You have an idea and want to develop business around it. Besides business model you need to position yourself and your product/service presence on web, to develop tools for sales, marketing and advertising of your product or service.
You have three possibilities how to pase development:
1- Do It Yourself
You are web designer and developer that wants to start its own company and put idea to work.You have in your saving account enough money to cover your bills for a year at around $2500 per month rate. During one year you have approximately 1200 hours to build and launch a product or service. Possibly during that year you can develop a product/service that brings some income or inspires third party investments. Troughout that year you will also do all web design and development tasks needed for your product / service to launch yourself.
2- In-House Teams
When you can afford it, building web design and development team is great way to grow your startup. You can recruit and train your employees and you can directly control the pace of their work. Unfortunately entrepreneurs rarely know how to identify job descriptions and skills set employee needs in order to fulfill all the responsibilities assigned to him. Many entrepreneurs find this difficult and struggle with this.
Hiring web developers and designers to perform 1200 hours of work will cost you approximately $50,000 provided that you have job that will cover your monthly expenses.
3- Outsource Services to Web Design Agency – In the absence of knowledge hire someone that does.
Many first-time or time-constrained entrepreneurs are outsourcing every aspect of their business. Outsourcing of initial projects is cheaper and easier because it alows you to grow your own business while keeping full-time position and maintaining steady income. This could include engaging consultants to help with web design, web development, graphic design, to assist with search engines, social media, etc. Since web design services cover vast spectrum of activities is another reason why is cheaper to outsource your web design and development tasks.
Costs of hiring a company to perform 1200 hours of work and create your product are roughly $150,000, assuming that you have a job your income should cover those costs or at least make it easier.
This may seem like the ideal approach when you do not have the knowledge to do it yourself, however there are problems that each party could face in this kind of co-operation.
Startups often stumble upon some issues when outsourcing software design and development
Never assign design and development tasks to the same person/individual. Professional background of good software engineer is different from the good web designer portfolio. Look for outsourcing web design agency whose team members have expertise with each group of skill sets.
Entrepreneurs think that they should begin the software development first and then or in the same time they address issues of the design and just affix it. Defining and designing all performance and functionality traits that one website and business web presence should have is essential to be done in advance because developing software for a shape shifting object results with stressed out engineers, and a lot of time and code goes to air.
Write detailed specification for your website as much as possible, your web designers and developers will appreciate that. Need help with writing a website specification? You can find them here. Try to forecast and discover all potential miscellaneous abuse that people may do with your website in order to create appropriate defense. Providing clear description of what you wish and want to achieve increases possibility to have all of your wishes come true. Proficient web design agency that offers expertise in each web design and development service will make your life easier.
Always determine milestones and assign them to different phases of project in cooperation with project manager. Defining of project phases and milestones with web design and development project manager will provide you with objective time scheduled expectations and strenghten the co-operation between the parties. Milestones will help you to follow and monitor project development step by step and all corrections can be done much easier.
Outsourcing companies on the other hand, face different kind of problems, primarily is uncertainty that their project will never see the light.
Often outsourcing companies deliver product to client, but the project didn’t generate traction and the entrepreneur lacked further will, vision or funds to invest in product refining and marketing.
Now that you decided to outsource next step is to choose right Web Design Agency with matching skills set for your project.
