Website design and maintenance is one of the few areas that nearly every organization outsources to third party organizations or contractors. It is also one of the riskiest endeavors you can undertake, since mistakes and problems with your website will literally cost you business. Here are three tips for making outsourcing web design projects successful. We’ll also explain why these steps are essential.
Understand Your Requirements Up Front
Are you creating a website to host content or an ecommerce site to sell products? Adding a shopping cart and links to payment processors is easier when you specify this at the onset, while ecommerce affects everything from the style of each page to the way the pages reference each other. If you’re going to sell content to your clients, are you going to send out a newsletter or maintain a paywall? If you determine what you want and what your project requires before you even start looking for talent, you’ll be able to look for those who have the expertise creating what you want. A web designer expecting to set up a general website promoting your brick and mortar store may not be the best choice for setting up full ecommerce functionality.
Understand Who and What You Need
If you don’t understand the different types of website designers and developers, learn about it before you ask a graphic designer to create a shopping cart or tell an internet marketer to alter the navigation on the site. If you’re not familiar with the types of expertise you need or how to translate your requirements into project descriptions, work with someone who is. This saves you from working with website designers who may outsource code development to someone you haven’t communicated with.
It also allows you to compare the skills the project needs versus those you have in house, so that you can tap into your own talent for tasks they can do and reduce the cost of the project. Simply knowing who on your team is qualified to work with or supervise the web designer is progress for some. Then you’ll know that your team can maintain the website once up but that you need to hire experts like those from eventige.com when you need to identify improvements to the site’s SEO or want to set up an email marketing campaign for the new site.
Don’t Change the Requirements Midstream
A general rule of thumb is that changing requirements multiplies the costs ten-fold as the project progresses. Changing your mind on the layout of a website when someone is still sketching out their general ideas is not a big deal. Changing your mind on the functions you want and the overall look of the site once someone has started coding is truly costly, both in terms of time and money.
Conclusion
Finding a great firm and making sure that your project goes according to plan boils down to a few core principles. Understand your requirements up front, vet each applicant, and make sure that you guide them every step of the way while keeping your objectives clear and consistent.