Hey Douglas,

> the solution was contracting for my own managed dedicated servers that are specifically tuned for WordPress

Would you mind sharing where this is offered? Whenever I see WordPress-tuned hosting it’s always limited by number of sites and expensive.

Thanks!

This needs context. I’m inclined to think people who experience these things are unreasonable and disrespectful. Especially if there’s a “blowup” which indicates the developer is at the end of their ropes with the client. They’ve tried to make it work and the client has proven impossible.

Things I’ve had clients do:

* Expect me to commit to an exact time and cost after a one sentence description. Become aggressive when I explain it’s not possible.
* Expect to make unlimited changes after the work and price are established, with no change affecting the cost or time. Become aggressive when I explain changes to the requirements add time and money.
* Provide a constant feed of unrelated requests and expect they will have no impact on time to completion of the active project. Become aggressive when I explain that fulfilling a time estimate depends on being able to focus on the project.
* Try to impose technical decisions about things they don’t understand, telling me to make changes that will clearly break the system. Become upset and complain I’m disrespecting them when I explain it’s not a technical possibility.
* Make awful changes to the system themselves that I have to spend huge amounts of time cleaning up, then complain that everything is taking longer. Sometimes not even recognize a problem was caused by their change and complain that I broke something.
* Think it’s their job to push Push PUSH to get things done faster.
* Present every request as an emergency. The business is always falling apart. If I can’t drop everything else that’s happening in my life, including work for other clients, they act as though they’ve been wronged.
* Expecting special treatment, especially free work. If I do agree to do a little more, respond by immediately trying to squeeze even more out of me. “Oh that’s great, how about this too? And this other thing?”
* Think they get to schedule my entire life outside the project, including knowing all the details of my personal life so they can approve my personal activities.

If a person behaves this way it’s inevitable that people become less and less inclined to deal with them.

Yes, but in reality, unless you actually develop the language itself, you aren’t really a developer either.

You’re just taking something other people have created and using it to put something together.

You’re a code monkey, not a developer.

And have you ever seen a code monkey try to put together a legitimate, professional website? They have no clue about UX/UI. They have no clue about marketing or sales. They have no clue about content discovery or SEO.

They are code monkeys, not developers. And they need to STOP using the term “developer.”

Can you please write some dedicated stuff on using Ajax in WordPress themes. I found some tutorials online but not very detailed.

Thanks alot

I really like these suggestions, Dave, thank you! I’ll be in touch as I make revisions and take the project forward. 🙂

Fred

I agree with Michael Bajadek that prerequisites should include clear knowledge of Object Oriented principles, CSS, HTML, JS, and MySQL.

I agree with David that you’re not going to get “implementers” and “builders” to agree to this, pay any attention to it at all, or stop using the term “developer” to advertise their services. These people know exactly what they are doing (preying on those who don’t know any better).

I’m also in agreement with David’s entire statement about the word “no” and about SEO. I do not have time in my day to keep up with the SEO end. I write semantic, accessible HTML with microdata where appropriate, and I will happily take direction from someone who specializes in SEO for anything beyond that (but third-parties do not get to touch my code or the client’s admin panel).

As far as “secret outsourcing” my contract clearly outlines the possibility of bringing in a third-party if necessary. I also state that this will be invisible to the client and that I take all responsibility for communicating with the contractor and ensuring that their work is up to the standard of the project.

Jason says Budget vs Expectation is an issue as well, and again, I agree with his comment.

As far as hosting, I typically set up and manage my clients’ hosting, but I don’t sell it to them.

For small clients, I find that a solid shared hosting provider is typically fine if someone is watching over the site and keeping up with maintenance (which I do). I have multiple clients on SiteGround and have had zero issues with SiteGround’s service or the sites themselves.

I don’t think enforcement would possible at this point, or maybe ever.
Peer-pressure could be valuable in the long run. For example, pointing to a widely agreed-upon set of standards as a point of reference in a conversation on Facebook.

As it stands, I think you’ve provided a valuable draft set of sensible standards and guidelines that the community should be aware of and contribute to.

If there’s a “core” group (ideally a majority, but that will take time) that adheres to a set of standards and broadcasts that adherence wherever possible, newer entrants to the community might take notice and attempt to live up those standards and better themselves.

At very least, a set of community standards raises awareness and draws a line in the sand. If it were publicized enough, clients might start to take notice, do more research, ask better questions, and ultimately hire better developers.

HA! In a perfect world right? But it’s worth consideration.

Personally, (and maybe somewhat hypocritically) I would’ve never gotten a start in freelance if I had to strictly adhere to those guidelines.

However, awareness of the guidelines would’ve given me a much clearer path and saved me from fighting to figure a lot of it out on my own.

I’d also like to respectfully disagree with Thomas above, in regards to:

“I WILL NOT OUTSOURCE LABOR WITHOUT INFORMING THE CLIENT. Secret outsourcing is unacceptable.”

In today’s world, transparency is more important than ever. Not just in WordPress development, but in everything we do. To hold yourself to a higher standard as a developer means providing full transparency from start to finish.

I’ve worked on several projects where the client was unhappy with their former “developer.” As soon as I got my hands on the code, I found actual evidence, in the code, that the previous “WordPress expert” outsourced the work. More often than not, it’s the outsourced code that causes the most frustration, and ultimately causes the project to fail.

Even if the person or company you’re outsourcing to does excellent work, the client still has the right to know. Just as they have the right to know YOUR knowledge & capabilities, they have a right to know who else you’re working with, and what their qualifications are.

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Just thought of something that might be worth considering:

A piece about keeping the software updated. I’m not sure exactly where to go with it, but when I think about the responsibility we have as WordPress whatever-we-ares, keeping the software up-to-date is one of the biggest responsibilities we have. I know I don’t have to convince you about the importance of security 😉

Even if we were to hit all the marks you’ve outlined above, and the client was thrilled with the end result (as it was originally delivered), should we not be ashamed of ourselves if we fail to at least discuss a plan for keeping the software current? Just as clients have no idea how to tell a good dev from a bad one, or evaluate our skills, they haven’t the darnedest clue about updating core, themes or plugins… not to mention updating PHP versions.

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Another thing… the client should own their site, and be able to get full access to it at any time, no questions asked. Even if we, as the agency/developer, are managing it for them, hosting it for them, whatever… it should be explicitly stated that the client owns the work, and full access to it, upon final payment.

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Feel free to reach out to me personally if you’d like to dive deeper into any of these ideas. I’m more than happy to contribute, brainstorm, proofread, whatever you need.