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Should You Outsource Web Development?
1st October 2012The simple answer, NO.
Quality
The quality of any project developed is of the utmost importance. Without a high standard of quality your website will be lacking in many areas, some unbeknownst to you until it is too late. Take for example Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), this requires that your code be clean and lean. By this we mean that there must be good structure to the website’s code, it must also have highly efficient code but above all the code needs to make sense. One of the biggest search engines in the world and many of the other major players take these key points in to consideration when producing results. Additionally they look at page sizes and if the code validates to W3C standards.
Sadly many outsourcing houses do not adhere to these rules; their main strategy is to make something that works and ship it out, rapidly. Their whole business plan is catered to volume over quality; a high rate of output with very little distinction between projects.
Professionalism
Many outsourcers claim to be professional & hard working developers. However many of their works can be closely compared to readily available templates, or ready built CMSs which they have slightly tailored to your needs.
We do not do this! With every project undertaken, we assess the company image, the brand the products of each customer individually, only then do we start to visualise something bespoke to the customer’s needs. Every project we have built has been designed and developed from the ground up; we care about our customers and our image. An unsatisfied customer is very bad news for us, we strive to reach perfection with each build and communicate with our customers on a regular basis to ensure their feedback is noted and used.
Best of British
Why choose anyone else? We already complain about so many of our jobs being given away to Non-British people so in one of the sectors YOU can control who you employ, why outsource?
The obvious reason would be that they are much cheaper. We do not believe so, for the simple reason that bad code and design can negatively impact your company for a long time, and this can cost a lot more. Search engines have become smart, very smart, they can link pages form all around the web to a single company. For most companies a lot of visitors come from search engines, as previously stated the quality of the website’s code must be up to standard and it must be efficient. Even after removing a badly built website and re-designing & re-developing it, a bad reputation can follow you for months. We also know that there are plenty of British cowboys out there too, but be sensible and smart, always ask for previous work, view the developer’s own site and their portfolio of work. To be thorough, contact the company that the developer has worked for and ask them about the quality of work and service received.
With British developers, generally there has been a rigorous framework of learning and understanding involved to build high quality websites. Most developers have had some form of formal training, and those that haven’t have proved themselves with a portfolio of work as that is the only way to succeed in this game.
