You may or may not need to hire a developer for your website. Just like with your site design, who you hire (and whether or not you hire anyone) depends a great deal on the type of site you are building. So let’s breakdown if and when you need to hire a developer/programmer/coder (they are one and the same) for your website.
Out-of-the-Box Websites
If you are building a site using one of the following website builders, you do not need a developer:
- Jimdo
- Squarespace
- Weebly Wix
The whole point of these site builders is that you do not need a developer to build a website.
Yes, it’s possible to add some custom HTML to these sites but, if you are thinking of trying to further customize your site, you really should change your website to a CMS.
Content Management System (CMS)
If you are using a CMS, such as Drupal, Joomla or WordPress, you may or may not want a developer. There are two things a developer could do for you in the case of a CMS site:
- Installing and setting up your site
- Customizing your theme and other aspects
You should hire a developer for the first step if you are unfamiliar with installing the CMS on a server and setting up your theme. It’s more likely you’ll need a developer if you are using Drupal than if you are using WordPress. WordPress you can set up yourself, if you are willing to spend the time.
But hire a developer if you are not sure what to do. You need to make sure the developer has the following skills:
- PHP coding experience (the code these CMSs are based in)
- CSS (design and styling language)
- HTML (the basic building block of the internet)
The customization of your site is a very, very different question: Normally, you should not overly customize a theme beyond making basic changes to its design (so that it no longer looks like a generic theme). The whole point of using a CMS is to not have a customized site. If you hire a developer to add customized PHP (or Javascript) to your theme, you will need a webmaster going forward, which is an expense you don’t necessarily need if you don’t customize the theme.
Custom Sites from Scratch
If you are building a site from scratch, you need a developer unless you know a programming language well enough to build a functioning website. But, as I’ve written elsewhere, you do not need one of these custom sites.