Many web design companies outsource most or all of their design and development work to India or other third world countries and in recent years these overseas companies have even been soliciting business owners directly, offering to build websites at costs that appear very attractive. Lets face it, overseas labor in third world countries is much cheaper than labor costs here in the U.S.A.
But, that labor comes with a catch! Have you ever called Microsoft customer service or support, AT&T, Yahoo, or any of a number of other companies that now outsource their customer service and support services to India or other third world countries? If so, how many times were those calls a pleasant experience and they were able to completely resolve your issue?
In the past, we at Dallas Website Design have tried working with a couple of companies and developers in India and former Soviet Republic countries, BUT, the quality of work, level of pride and work ethic were not up to par, and the websites they produced were not up to the quality standards that we at Dallas Website Design demand for our clients. We ended up having to fix or rebuild those websites using our own in house developers right here in the good old U.S.A..
In addition to the problems with the quality of websites, there are problems in communicating specific needs and development or design requirements. For example, we had a medical facility that wanted an online appointment scheduling application so their patients would be able to make appointments directly on their website and cut down on their front office labor costs. We tried giving the project to a company in India to keep development costs reasonable and provide our client with the application at the lowest possible cost. After working with the company for over 4 months and paying them 3 1/2 times more than the price they originally quoted, they were nowhere near having the application we specified and we ended up having to fire the company and write off the money we paid out, then have our in-house American programmer completely rework the application to fit the client’s needs.
On the few other projects we tried outsourcing, none were anywhere near acceptable and ended up costing more to repair the websites and correct shoddy programming than it would have cost to develop them in-house.
Another common problem is that in many countries copyright and trademark laws are either ignored or not enforced, and the custom designed website that you thought you were getting and that you actually paid for may very well be a knock off of someone else’s website, with just the text and images changed out.
Finally, overseas companies either do not seem to understand the need for securing websites, or just don’t care. Websites that are built in third world countries tend to be far more vulnerable to hacking and security exploitations.
Can you get your website built cheaper by outsourcing the project overseas? Most definitely! However, as the saying goes “You get what you pay for,” and you may very well end up with a website that doesn’t work properly, took far longer to build than was promised, or even find yourself being sued for copyright infringement and/or forced to take down the website at some point in the future.
One of the most important questions you can ask of any web design company you are thinking about hiring is whether they have local designers and programmers, or if your website project will be outsourced overseas.
We learned our lesson the hard way! While outsourcing projects overseas is very attractive on the surface, in the end the only one that comes out a winner is located in a third world country and outside of U.S. Jurisdiction.
Your website is a gateway to the world and reflects how potential customers/clients view your business. The better the image you project, the more likely you are to bring in new customers and grow your business. And, the bottom line is that’s the reason you’re looking to have a website built or to update your current website.
