A Web Developer builds and maintains your website: page templates, the content management setup your marketing colleagues publish through, forms and their handling, third-party integrations, performance, and the deployment process that puts changes live. It is worth separating the role from two neighbours before you write the advert. A Web Designer decides how pages should look and behave; a Frontend Developer more often works inside a product application built with a JavaScript framework. A Web Developer is the person who turns a design into a working, fast, accessible site that non-technical colleagues can update without breaking it. That last clause is the part employers most often forget to assess, and it is usually the difference between a site the marketing team can run and one that needs a developer for every word change.
Ask for live URLs rather than screenshots and then open them on your phone. A great deal becomes clear in thirty seconds: does it load quickly, does it work at an awkward width, does the keyboard tab order make sense. Ask who maintained the site afterwards and whether non-technical colleagues could update it, because building a site is easier than building one someone else can run. Look for a developer who mentions accessibility and speed unprompted, since those are the qualities that quietly determine whether the site serves the business or embarrasses it.
Ask them to pick a site they built and walk you through a decision they now regret. Then ask what they would check if a page suddenly felt slow, listening for a diagnostic order rather than a guess about images. A strong practical question is: our marketing lead needs to publish a new landing page without asking a developer, so how would you set that up? It tests whether they design for handover. Ask how they would make a page work for someone using a keyboard only, which is a fair proxy for whether accessibility is habit or afterthought.
Agencies are the deepest pool, since agency developers ship many sites quickly and often want more ownership than client work allows. Freelancers with a strong portfolio can be converted to permanent roles or engaged first on a defined project, which doubles as a paid trial. Content management platform communities and local web meetups surface practitioners, and open-source theme or plugin contributors are visible and easy to assess. Name your platform and hosting in the advert, because a developer with direct experience of your stack will be productive weeks earlier than one learning it.
A portfolio of sites that are no longer live, or that the candidate cannot discuss in detail, deserves careful questioning. Be cautious of someone who dismisses accessibility as a legal box or treats page speed as something to fix later, because both get much harder once a site is built. Watch for a developer who wants to rebuild everything with a new framework before understanding the business need, and for anyone who resists content management on the grounds that they would rather edit templates directly. That preference guarantees your marketing team stays dependent on them.
Portfolios are the heart of this hire and they are exactly what gets lost in an email inbox. Pitch N Hire's ATS keeps every application, portfolio link, and reviewer comment on one candidate record, so the hiring manager and the marketing stakeholder can assess the same work rather than forwarding attachments. Structured screening questions on platform, content management experience, and accessibility filter the pipeline early. If you run a small paid exercise, keeping submissions and scorecards together makes the comparison fair and the decision quick, which matters because capable web developers rarely stay available long.
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