Hiring developers from an offshore company is always beneficial for your budget but there are certain parameters need to be taken care for successful and quality project completion. One of the most important parameter is international standard following in code structure because once you complete the project it is not entirely necessary that you will be hiring same developer from same company in future. If the code is not written in standard format it will certainly not be easier for your next developer or company to understand the code and work on it. Following is some structures that is important to follow for coding practices in international market.
Signature in header: Each file should be having a set of information in header including author name, date of creation, date of modification, number of modification, purpose of code. This set of information really helps a new developer to understand what exactly was running in the mind of developer while working on the file. The same structure should also be followed for functions including purpose of functions, input and output details and developer name.
Braces and indentation: Writing a code always includes cases and loops along with functions, use of braces with specific set of indentation makes a code cleaner and readable in one go. Without a proper use of indentation and braces it would look complete messy and will take a lot of effort to understand it. Pairing of closing and starting braces is also very very important because human eyes are not compiler or editor which can automatically reads the pairing of them.
Use of spaces and enters: A code is and files is said to be perfect when its size is in equivalency with written piece of information. Using non proper enters, tabs and spaces only makes it larger in size. There should be a proper gaps (or spaces) in between all of the codes and piece of codes.
Use of comments: In PHP complete inline documentation comment blocks must be provided. PHP follows C and C++ like style comments. Comments are generally used to make code more informative. Sometimes what I think for a task is something different what you think and to convey ideas and thoughts over codes comments are most important part of coding practices. There should always be a proper use of comments to describe the purpose and logic of code piece by developers.
Variables and constants: A dynamic thing can never run without use of variables and for a standard codes a variable should be named as descriptive as possible like user_id, first_name, last_name etc which will explain itself while going through the code, added advantage comes in picture when while declaring the variable a small note is also mentioned along with. The same format should also be followed for constants.
Above mentioned points are those small basic points which you should check before awarding a project to any company. Ask for examples and coding standard manual for matching them, spend some time initially before starting your project.