Taking Your Web Development Elsewhere

Developing a web site for your business is an important step to stay in touch with your customers and to take advantage of the many marketing opportunities having a web site for your business makes possible. But even if your company already has an IT department for care and feeding of your corporate computer and network systems, web development is an entirely different animal from the computer gurus you may be used to working with.

So it’s worth thinking at length about whether you want to go to the effort and expense of building an in house web development department to build and maintain your corporate internet presence. In many cases developing that expertise in house has a lot of downsides and is really not cost justified as compared to the idea of outsourcing web development to an external company.

The biggest determining factor on whether you should set out on the big job of building an in house web development team is how much you expect to need that team working to keep that web site up and running and how much it will change on a regular basis. Remember, if you bring on board even just two or three web developers, you will need to keep these well paid and highly specialized individuals busy 40 hours a week. Now this may not be an issue when you are first building a web presence for your company. But if you feel your web site will not change a great deal, you could find yourself with a very expensive sub-department under IT that really has no other uses than to keep developing that web site.

Just hiring a couple web programmers is not going to be sufficient to build a fully functional web development team. Much of what will make your web site a success or a failure is at the design level. So you will not only need talented web programmers trained in the most up to date internet technologies, you will need a manger of that team and web designers who know how to make your web site great day one and keep it great each and every week in the future.

Staying up to date in internet technologies is also a big challenge when keeping a team of web designers and programmers on staff. The internet is a fast moving environment and new technologies replace old ones at least once each year if not more often than that. If you are keeping this expertise on staff, it will be up to you to fund their ongoing education and pay for upgrades to equipment and software so they can keep your web site cutting edge day in and day out.

When you outsource web development, you trade out many of the issues of keeping technical people on staff for that entrepreneurial spirit that seeks to get your business and then keep it. That means you can take bids for the task of building your web site and make the best web development companies in town work to earn the business. These companies already know how to run a web development team. They have the programmers, the tools, the software and the designers to put at your disposal for the initial design and for ongoing maintenance and improvement of your web site.

A final strong argument for starting out with an external web development team is that you will get the project of getting your web site up much more quickly. As soon as you select the best company to do the job for you, they will be into the process of designing your site in a matter of days. But if you set out to build an internal web development team first, it could be months before that team is together and ready to take on the project of building your corporate web site.

You can always structure your agreement with your web development company that you own the source code and that at periodic intervals, you can terminate the company and take the function in house. In fact, a good outsourcing web team can help you build that internal department and support them every step of the way. In that way, you are productive early on and each new development is handled in a professional manner. That is what you want when launching out into cyberspace with your corporate web site.