Who actually does the work

When you are quoted a price for a website, you assume it buys "a developer". A serious build involves people nobody told you existed, and their absence is exactly why the cheap version falls apart after eight months.

• QA engineer The person who looks for ways to break something before your customer finds it by accident. Open the field →
• Sysadmin and DevOps Responsible for the site being reachable, fast, and recoverable after failure. Open the field →
• Frontend developer Turns the design into something that works in a browser, at any screen size, with a keyboard, on a slow connection. Open the field →
• Backend developer Responsible for what you do not see: orders, users, stock, connections to external systems, data security. Open the field →
• UX designer Decides how a person gets from their question to the action: what sits where, how many steps checkout has, what happens on error. Open the field →
• Technical SEO specialist Checks whether machines can read the site: whether pages load for crawlers, whether URLs are duplicated, whether the structure is legible. Open the field →
• Copywriter Writes the copy that decides whether anyone contacts you. Open the field →
• PPC specialist Decides where your ad money goes and watches what comes back. Open the field →
• Analytics specialist Sets up what gets counted and makes sure the numbers are true. Open the field →
• Project manager The person who knows who is waiting on whom. Open the field →