What skills to ask for when hiring? Appreciate all the help I can get!

Hi Guys,

I run a small (& new) consulting company for small fund/financial/gaming start ups.

I am looking to hire a web developer/designer on a short-term contract (3 months) with option to become a full time employee.

Unfortunately I have zero tech knowledge/skills and have no idea what these might mean:

Photoshop
Corel draw
Illustrator
Flash
Dream weaver
Adobe CS2 CS3 CS5 Suite (or higher)
Flash animation
Multi-media production for the web (Flash intro, Flash Banner)
HTML, W3C HTML,HTML 5, CSS CSS3

Amongst many others tools etc.

So here I am to seek your vast knowledge/wisdom and pick your brains. I will describe a site I foresee my business would need to supply and I hope you guys can point out the core and preferred skills I should be looking for in the developer/designer I wish to hire. Thank you for your time and apologies for the wrong usage of any terminology!

  • Creation of logo (s)

  • Advice acquiring of website, hosting, server (if required)

  • A site with following pages (available to everyone who visits):
    (About Us): Can be updated by client
    (Results/Past reports): Data page from stocks/indices price movements gains & losses. Can be simple data entry from client to be converted to a table on this page.
    (Purchase): Link payment details for subscription services or financial written reviews and reports. Eg. accepting e-wallets, paypal, other types of payment methods to be advised by clients.
    (Contact us): Simple form with required fields to be linked to clients email of choice.
    (Social Media plug ins): Able to embed widgets like Twitter & Weibo (China Twitter) etc onto the site (all pages)

Subscribers/Members Area “Wall”:

  • A wall (Log-in only for paid subscribers) where webmaster (client) can post data/reports. The wall must be able to update in real-time (ie. clients do not have to relog to see if new reports are posted on the wall). So the new posts will be like “feeds” instantly posted and added to the wall.
  • Webmaster (client) to be able to manage posted data on “Wall”. Eg report in member area is forecast for week-ending 30th April. Webmaster decides its time to release report to public, non-paying members. Webmaster can click to send/retrieve posted data from the “Results/Reports” page from non-subscriber/member area.
  • Auto log out if same account(subscriber) logs in from different location. Meaning only 1 log-in ID stays logged in at all time
  • Record last 5 log-ins of individual users (subscribers): Date,Time and IP Address of each log-in. (To detect sharing of accounts). Will be bonus if can click on IP address to be linked to location/country/server user is connecting from.

Others:

  • At least 2 ways/plans of retrieving site if it gets hijacked or hacked
  • Preventing attacks/spam/Dos
  • Track total number of visitors and countries they are from
  • Build and make sites as easy as possible to have multi-language versions in future.
  • Webmaster creates,disables,changes password for all its subscribers. Able to have details column on side for clients own notes.

The above is what my clients will be requiring for their websites. I would be needing someone to be able to build these sites. I believe basic designing is a must and perhaps some flash knowledge to make the sites seem edgy a bonus. However my clients are in the business of selling reports and reviews so there isn’t a need for live data eg. stock prices to be constantly fed onto the site. The only thing being posted and moved around on the sites are the reviews/reports my client writes for their subscribers.

Appreciate all the help I can get on the skills my dream employee needs, and the skills it will be a bonus to have. I do hope to be as clear as I can with the skills required to save time & money for both myself and the prospective employee versus hiring and firing several times. Thank you once again!

Regards
Brucious39

PS: Apologies if I posted in the wrong thread!:eye:

[FONT=Georgia]hmph, I feel like you’re being way specific for something you don’t actually know about. Seems like a good way to get an unskilled person with a buzzword-padded resume, instead of someone actually capable of seeing a project through.

Maybe a better approach would be to focus on portfolios, experience, good work-ethic and overall personality?[/FONT]

And perhaps you ought to get two people; a graphic designer (for the logo designs, etc.) and also a web designer (for the building of the website, managing the server, etc.).

Thanks for the suggestion. So you feel its too much to ask of one person? As in, its not normal for one person to be able to handle what I am asking for?

Yes I am being specific and only because I want to make sure the person I hire can do the job… What are the core skills needed for the specific sites my clients will be asking for? I will definitely be focusing on portfolios, experience and even references but just to be specific I would like to know the skills required for the job I am asking for…

Thank you for taking the time to reply!!:wink:

It’s possible for one person to do both things, but it’s inefficient. And persons who are specialist designers tend to be better designers, and persons who are specialist web developers tend to be better web developers, than those persons who try to juggle both at once.

Yes I am being specific and only because I want to make sure the person I hire can do the job… What are the core skills needed for the specific sites my clients will be asking for? I will definitely be focusing on portfolios, experience and even references but just to be specific I would like to know the skills required for the job I am asking for…

[FONT=Georgia]Well that gets back to my first point. You don’t know what you want, so throwing every word you could think of out there, and trying to get someone who fits won’t work well.

Every developer has his or her own way of working. For example, you listed both Dreamweaver and ‘W3C HTML’ – Those can sometimes be opposite ways of working; Dreamweaver is a program that generates HTML, meanwhile standard-compliant, ‘W3C HTML’, would probably come from someone who '[URL=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_coding”]handcodes’. No one way is right or wrong; But they aren’t always the same way. You get what I’m saying?

So again, I think you should forget the specifics (because you don’t know what they mean), and just focus on their evidence of results; ie. persons with great portfolios and track records. Hire them, then trust that they know what they’re doing.[/FONT]

Off Topic:

I’ll ask the Sitepoint mods to move your thread over to ‘Business and Legal Issues’.

Welcome to the forums!

I pretty much echo what Shaun said, what you’re looking for would involve several disciplines/skill sets, and therefore mostly likely two or more people:

  1. A graphic designer to design visuals, eg logos
  • you could outsource graphic creation rather than take anyone on full time
  1. A front end web developer to actually build the site
  • a major part of any site development so you’d need someone long term for this
  1. A programmer for site functionality, eg ecommerce and membership functionality
  • again, often a major part of development so you’d likely need a 2nd person here
  1. A server specialist, eg preventing DDoS attacks, though your web hosting company will usually take care of this stuff for you. A note here you can’t prevent things like DDoS’s happening but a good web host will catch it if it happens and take action to stop it.
  • most web developers/programmers should be able to advise you on suitable hosting

Thank you guys for the help! I’ll begin putting together my hiring ads and let you know what comes along. Hope to be able to update you guys with good news.

Thanks once again for being so helpful!