Hiring a web developer in Orlando

The three options, and how each one fails

The freelancer

Cheapest, fastest to start, and you talk to the person doing the work. The failure mode is availability: one person has one life, and when they take a full-time job, get ill, or simply lose interest, your site has no one. Ask what happens to your project if they are unavailable for a month, and listen to whether they have an answer ready.

The agency

Process, continuity, and a bench deep enough that nobody is a single point of failure. The failure mode is distance: the senior person who won the work is rarely the person doing it, and your project can sit third in a queue behind two larger accounts. Ask who will actually write the code and whether you will ever speak to them.

The studio

Small, senior, and the people who quote are the people who build. The failure mode is capacity: a good small studio is often booked, and cannot absorb a sudden doubling of scope. Ask when they can actually start, and treat "immediately" from a busy-looking studio as a question rather than good news.

There is no correct answer among the three. There is only which failure mode you can live with, and you should pick it deliberately rather than by who replied first.

What "local" is actually worth

Less than local firms imply and more than remote-only firms admit. The work itself does not care where it is done. What being in Orlando genuinely buys you: someone who can sit across a table when a project is going badly, an understanding of the local market you are selling into, and — for anything touching local search — the ability to check how your business looks from points around the metro rather than from a desk in another time zone.

What it does not buy you is quality. A local developer is not automatically better than a remote one, and "supporting a local business" is a reason to choose between two good options, not a reason to accept a worse one.

The six questions

Ask all of these before money changes hands. The answers matter less than whether they are given directly.

Things that should stop the conversation

• A guaranteed Google ranking. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee here means either a meaningless promise or a plan to rank you for a phrase no one searches.
• Refusing to hand over the domain. Your domain is your business address. It goes in your name, in your account, on day one.
• A quote with no scope attached. A number without a written list of what it covers is not a quote, it is an opening position.
• Payment in full up front, from someone with no track record you can verify. Staged payments tied to milestones protect both sides.
• Portfolio links that no longer work. Check three of them. It takes two minutes and it is remarkable how often they are dead.

A note on what this page is

We are a studio in Orlando and we would like to quote your project. That is a reason to read this critically — so here is the bias stated plainly: the framing above is kind to studios, because we think small-and-senior is the right shape for most small-business projects. If your project is large, long-running and needs several people on it at once, an agency is the better answer and we will say so on the call rather than take the work and struggle with it.