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5 Simple tips to hire the right App Developer

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There is no doubt that almost every business nowadays has a mobile app. If you don’t, oh dear, you are missing out enormous opportunities to boost your productivity. In fact, developing an app for your business is not an activity of amusement anymore, it’s a must. That’s because today’s customer are mainly depended on smartphones to do their daily business tasks.

Related: Five Benefits Of Custom Application Development For Your Business

The thing is that finding a developer you are confident and comfortable working with can be a horror story, time-consuming task. And if you don’t make a right choice, you can end up wasting lots of money for an app that doesn’t satisfy your business requirement and not match the way you wish to operate.

If you’re at that phase, no matter which direction you choose to go, here are 5 key points that you should keep in mind. It’s not only to help you better evaluate your potential developers, but also to deepen your understanding of what’s best for you and your business.

Choose a candidate with experience

The first and foremost thing you need to do while hiring an app developer is requesting a portfolio of their apps they have built so far.

It’s not just for evaluating them, also for you to make sure you can hire the right one who had experienced in relevant field.Because if you don’t, imagine bringing on a developer with years of experience in building Android apps to develop an iOS app, how terrible!

Besides, when evaluating the portfolios of developers, here are a few questions you need to highly consider:

  • What kind of applications they have built? (yup, I have mentioned above how important it is)
  • On which mobile platform they have been creating the most mobile apps?
  • What the clients said about their works?

Start with a small talk

If developers don’t know what purpose that your app should serve, they can not create an effective one for you. That’s why communication becomes a thing of matter.

You need to clearly specify all the details of your project and watch the developer’s reactions closely to find out whether they have interest in your business or not. Because if they don’t, they may not give their best innovative ideas that they could.

The more you communicate with each other, the smoother the process will go, which consequently results in getting the preferred outcome.

Do check the developer’s technical skills

Developing a mobile app might require various tools, technologies & platforms. Make sure that the developer is familiar with all these.

However, please kindly note that fluency in an impressive number of program won’t make or break that developer. The one with an eagerness to learn will always serve you better.

Related: 6 Common Mistakes Can Kill Your App

Make sure the prices

You wouldn’t buy a car without knowing how much it costs, right?

Every developer has their different pricing structure, so what you should ask is whether it’s a flat project price or hourly rate is used. The most important thing is that you have to know exactly what you’re paying for. Asking for an detailed list of deliverables included in the price is the only way to get clear about how much your app’s actually going to cost you.

However, do not let the price drives you. You have to know that an app is always a long-term investment in your business and future, and therefore should be treated as such. If you are looking for someone offering cheaper quote, your app will look cheap as well. Whatever you are thinking, think bigger. Let’s imagine where you will see your business in next few years with that app.

Hire an offshore development company

If you have a tight budget, hiring a native app developer sometimes can turn out to be too expensive. In that case, offshoring your app is a good idea to get it build at affordable prices.

It doesn’t mean that you are compromising with quality to save a few dollars. It’s just about filling your team with talent people all around the world.

Final words

Building a simple mobile app might be a child’s play, but a seamless one takes complex programming. It takes time and practice to produce a “be-you” product which attains the quality online presence your brand deserves, not just a rushed creation from a dull off-the-shelf applications.

Deciding to hire a suitable developer to create a flawless app for your business can be a daunting decision. I hope that my blogpost helped you to relieve that stress a little bit.

Also, if you have any question regarding outsourcing your applications, please don’t hesitate to contact Designveloper. That’s something we can definitely help you!

Get started with editorial design

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Editorial design can be a daunting task for someone who isn’t used to formatting large amounts of text. The skills you’ll need are different to those of other types of graphic design – organization and planning are key. However, if you’re keen to add another skill to your design portfolio, editorial design could be a great place to start. 

In this article, I’ll share some editorial design tips to make sure your life doesn’t suck while designing editorial layouts in InDesign CC. If you want to take things further, check out our guide to brochure design and our article that teaches you how to design a book cover. 

01. Get organized first

InDesign is set up specifically for editorial design

First things first: you need to have all the content organized and finalized before starting to work on the design of your book. Working with content that is still developing will only lead to an inconsistent product and plenty of headaches along the way.

Keep chapters separate and use InDesign’s book feature to link them all together. Never, ever, try to work with one long InDesign document for multiple chapters in a book. It will make your life a living hell.

02. Set up master pages

Set up your Master pages before doing anything else. Your Master pages will include any design elements that will carry through the whole layout, such as folios and automatic page numbering.

Use separate Master pages for different editorial layouts within your document. For example, if you have a sidebar column, set up a master for that type of layout. If you have a layout for the beginning of a chapter, set up a master for that. If you have an Appendix with no formatting, set up a blank master for that… you can see what I’m getting at.

You can use as many Master layouts as you need. This will be a huge time saver in the end.

03. Establish a visual hierarchy

Make sure you establish a visual hierarchy, and stick with it. No matter the editorial content, a hierarchy is key. As well as being more aesthetically pleasing, a hierarchy will enable readers to skim the page and find the content they’re looking for. A basic outline for text hierarchy might look something like this: Main headline, subhead 1, subhead 2, pull quotes; body content, captions, folios.

It is very important to make sure the design of each level of the hierarchy is consistent throughout the document, which is where Styles come in. Styles are your best friend; use as many Paragraph and Character Styles as you can. The more efficient you are with these, the easier it is to make sure everything is consistent.

04. Create a balanced layout

Use images to offset text so headlines don’t line up

Think about the balance of imagery and text in your layout. It can be a good idea to use images to break bigger chunks of text into digestible blocks to make them easier to read and absorb. Visuals will also make the page more interesting to look at.

Ideally, you want to make sure headlines don’t crash into each other. For example, in a 2-column layout, you would not want to have both columns starting on the same line (above left). Add images to offset the columns (above right), or use the Span Columns function to create a headline that runs across both columns of text.

05. Don’t forget about screens

It’s not unusual for print articles to be made available to view as PDFs online, so you may need to consider this in your design too. If designing an editorial piece for print, make sure it will be readable when viewed on a screen.

PDFs will often have live hyperlinks, so check these all work. Also consider using links within your table of contents, so readers can quickly jump to the chapter or section they want.

06. Choose fonts carefully

This infographic compares serif and sans-serif fonts

Your decision on which typefaces to use should be based on where most readers will be viewing the editorial. Many people argue that serif fonts are best for large blocks of text in print, while sans-serif fonts work better for large blocks of text on screen.