The case for local internet design and development outsourcing.

Why Internet Outsourcing Works - here in the Tampa bay, not Bombay!

Outsourcing dramatically lowers your cost per worker

You eliminate health care costs, liability insurance, overtime pay, sick pay, absenteeism, worker complaints and / or conflicts between personnel.

There's much more here - click "Employer Overhead Details" below for the full details - you will be amazed at the number of complications, expenses and government regulations you can avoid with off-site outsourcing.

There are certain fields that lend themselves more efficiently to outsourcing than others and the internet is one of the best. You can see results from the contractee location as easily as from your own.

You, or your project manager, can monitor daily or moment to moment from your location.

When I used to work on site we were discouraged from leaving our cubicle to converse with the project manager. Even though we were in the same office we communicated by email and our work was viewed on the manager's monitor. We might as well have been off-site, saving the employer thousands.

With outsourcing, there is no wasted time...you pay only for the time the developers actually need to complete your project.

EXAMPLE_Farming : A tractor sits idle in your barn (not consuming) until needed to plow a field or pull a harvester. A mule must be fed and maintained year round - need him or not.

Outsourcing reduces the time it takes to get things done. Tasks are broken divided up between people who are experienced with the task requested of them.

It also reduces the work day for the contractees by eliminating travel time. There's more - read "Employee's Overhead" below.

Outsourcing provides your company with a full staff of part time employees, each highly trained in their 'niche' to produce superior results.

Outsourcing reduces the costs your company must incur for equipment, software, office floor space, etc

See "Benefits for Your Company" below.

A little known fact: In most cases, when you pull around to the drive up window at a large chain fast food restaurant the person taking your order is not there! They are at an outsource order center. The headphone mic on the person at the window goes to the kitchen area for adjusting existing orders. Local outsourcing is happening right now - all around you.

Click on the headings below to see the details - click again to close.

Who Should Outsource Their Web Design and Maintenance?

Who should and who shouldn't

Nowadays when every service from repairing a lawn mower to business consulting is at a record high cost we are compelled to attempt to build or fix everything ourselves. Depending on the task, it can cost more to do it yourself if you are not fully competent at that particular operation.

You could lose money in your own lost hours as well as (analogously) material waste in failed attempts that destroy film, wood paneling sheets or poorly finished concrete slabs that must be destroyed and re-done, etc.

You need an in house staff : If you are an actual internet tech business selling software for download or your web site IS your business - this would warrant a full time staff.

You should consider outsourcing: If you are a business that uses the internet as a tool, you may likely not need an in house staff. You could find yourself thinking up make-work tasks to keep idle staff busy.

Some Examples

A company like UPS relies on a fleet of trucks to do business, and has a huge staff of mechanics to keep the trucks on the road, three hundred and sixty five days a year - it is a necessity. A bakery that delivers products locally with two or three vans would be insane to have full time mechanics on staff.

On the other hand some large corporations are total outsource. Carnival Cruise Lines is a good example. Taking their name from land based carnivals where every ride, attraction and game is an independent contractor, Carnival Cruise Lines minimizes their staffing problems by uniting an army of outsources. The food is handled by one company, the photography by another, the music by a booking agency and so on.

This system effectively lowers the number of people management has to deal with. You would need to deal only with the "captain" of whatever function, and he is responsible for his people. Each outsource would be expert in that field only. The ship's Captain and crew are among their few true employees.

In this environment the outsource company must perform to standards or be replaced. This insures quality as there is no government protections for a contractee that does not fulfill his contract satisfactorily. Try that with an employee and see what happens!

Consider these benefits of off-site outsourcing of your internet presence

Benefits for Your Company

Many companies do not have a need for a full time web designer / webmaster but still need the services of someone totally familiar with their business, their goals and their particular web site.: An on-call outsource webmaster who also may have built or re-designed your web site, is familiar with your company's web site. He also is familiar your company's hierarchy (who to call for what) and retains collateral for re-use (from the design process) and can eliminate delays and many billable hours.
Internet Outsource Tampabay has a retinue of specialists for various tasks.

To keep employees on-site, there are more expenses absorbed by the hiring company than you might imagine.

Employer Overhead Details

The Basic Wage

This is the easy part.

Employer SSN Contribution

The home office worker pays this himself as self employment tax .

Health Care

The more valuable the worker is ( greater experience in the field, and people peak intellectually at middle age) the more expensive the premium - and small business pays far more than big business per employee.

Computers, Maintenance, Software and Updates

Designers, especially, need high-end computers and thousands of dollars worth of software.

Floor space in an office facility

Benefits Packages

"Without the large numbers of employees required to negotiate favorable insurance deals and affordable financial services, small firms can't compete head-to-head with large companies for benefits."

Liability Insurance and Workman's Comp

Employer Unemployment Insurance Contribution

Paid Leave

"Most sick leave policies foster a 'use it or lose it' mind-set, and employees feel entitled to a certain number of sick days."

Absenteeism

This costs employers millions per year and can often be caused by unfavorable conditions in the office environment.

REGULATIONS: Employment is highly regulated by the government — the items above are either required for the employee to operate, human pitfalls or government mandates. Nonetheless, all are guaranteed outcomes and all constitute company expense.

Employers tend to overlook that there is an overhead factor for the employee as well. These are the expenses the worker absorbs to be on-site and company "image compliant".

These crucial factors directly impact what the prospective employee will demand as salary.

Suitable Wardrobe

Automobile

Initial cost of vehicle

Maintenance and repair

Gasoline

Highway tolls

These don't even address the lengthening of the work day and stress due to travel time and traffic.

Lunches Out

Child Care (children playing outside after school are no more distracting than typical office chatter)

Child care constitutes a major weekly expense for young families.

Cell Phones for Personal Communication

Absolutely necessary for working mothers

There are many non-monetary home office worker benefits that increase personal well being as well as productivity.

The many benefits to the off site designers and programmers:

None of the Employee's Overhead outlined earlier.

Gross means nothing - net means everything.

People who work in their own office space are generally happier because they :

Start the day free of the stress of rushing out the door and dealing with rush hour.

This can reduce the work day dramatically

Even with time - gross means nothing - net means everything

Are unaffected by gossip, personal conflicts and inter-office intrigue.

Can play their favorite background music.

Can adjust, to their comfort level, their...

temperature

air quality (people with allergies can use an air filter)

brightness of lighting

Dress comfortably and have the company of a beloved cat or dog curled up beside them. Don't laugh - this would be great benefit for the morale of many.

Work at home mothers can take children to school and pick them up when needed without reciprocal arrangements or paid helpers.

Slightly ill people needn't lose hours to protect others at the office.

They also are not hit with the conflict of calling in a sick day because their child has a cold.

Accountability of paid man-hours VS. value received - an all important consideration for you!

There are certain fields that lend themselves more efficiently to outsourcing than others and the internet is one very good one.

Everything accomplished by a remote worker shows up, that day, as collateral. Either visible on the surface as design work or, at the code level, by looking at the source view.

You or your project coordinator, at your location, could supervise a half dozen people working off-site, as easy as cubicle to cubicle.

With a daily online report that includes hours, area worked on and on which project the work was done - a company can monitor multiple outsource workstations with ease. Please see "Track Billing

Beware of the deceptive Résumé!

When using a staffing agency to find job candidates: Make sure that you rely on more than just résumés. A Résumé exists for the sole purpose of making a case for the subject of the document. In the creative field it would make more sense to rely on what you see than what you hear. Online examples or portfolios are the better judge. Aquent, a web oriented staffing agency, knows that a mere resume cannot prove real world ability in creative fields. They require more than a résumé to take you seriously.

People outside the field don't understand who does what on the internet. Designers make lousy programmers and programmers make lousy designers - period. When I see the Monster.Com responses to my resume I am amazed at how little the hiring personnel know of internet related skill sets. Never assume competence - especially if you do not personally know all the players in the game.

Below is a real job description for a web designer position. I have annotated it so you might understand the confusion that is going on in the internet / web design job market. The less people involved in an operation the more efficient it is. Just like engineering a machine - the more moving partsthere are, the more that can go wrong.

(click each requirement heading for commentary)

Information architecture background

It has some degree of origin in the library sciences. Many library schools teach information architecture. What they must mean is ability to organize information logically. Or do they want a librarian as well?

Great design skills

That's all a "web designer" really is, though there is no limit to the current popular re-specification.

Someone who has worked in a portal environment.

Portal sites are dynamic structures that pull their content from outside their sites. Aside from a header, logo and some accent graphics it's all programming.

Programmers make lousy designers and vice versa - it's the nature of the beast. Designers have an art background and programmers have a computer science background. They reside in two separate sides of the brain.

Must be very experienced in W3C standards for HTML and DHTML

This falls into the web design venue.

It can be a bit overrated at times - usually by programmers with no design skills.

Must be knowledgeable in Javascript and Flash.

Just knowledgeable - or able to actually do it? Flash has become a niche specialty because the majority of clients request it so infrequently. Flash also has a proprietary scripting language. You'll find a dozen reasons not to use Flash in the resources section of this site.

People posting resumes would always claim yes to both, though few designers are truly proficient in either programming or dazzling Flash work.

Web site usability

Very general, but it hints at a designer having an organized approach to site navigation, which is all important. A popular catch phrase now is "GUI" or Graphical User Interface.

Javascript.

They are seeking a programmer here, not a designer.

Strong web front-end developer

Here, they are seeking a designer and not a programmer.

Someone who has experience in designing how pages work together and how applications work.

This is very reasonable - a designer needs to be able to produce the needed elements for the programmers.

Someone who can be told "here's a process, now design a site to support that process."

This is very reasonable - on a large project that would be the team leader. He would dole out the tasks to the specialists for all of the above

HERE IS THE PROBLEM WITH THIS JOB DESCRIPTION

They are not looking for an employee, they are looking for a team - and all in one person!

One axiom that hiring personnel need to become aware of - "programmers make lousy designers and designers make lousy programmers." In all my years in the web business this has been proven to be nearly 100% accurate.

A claim of too many specialties in one person almost always creates mediocre results in most efforts.

But - if you do find such an Über Mensch:

Prepare to pay very big bucks$$

Ah, but here's the rub:

He can only perform one his specialties at any given time!!

HERE IS THE SOLUTION: (arrived at from 12 years in this profession)

On a simple, non dynamic site project (sometimes called a "brochure site") an average outsource designer could do it all himself.

But the job description here implies a larger project needing excellent design skills, heavy programming and organizational training - an outsource would partner the designer with whomever he needs to provide all elements professionally.

Let's say this hypothetical project took two months total man hours to complete.

And hypothetically the designer and programmer needed equal amounts of time to produce their results.

Each specialist would put in his required percentage of the total hours

Paying two separate minds to function at optimum rather than one person to speed ahead at his specialty and struggle with the other requirements.

The client would receive his results in a single month - for less money.

What about employing"cheap labor"?
There is no savings in hiring ten people to dig a ditch over contracting a back hoe. It will take a whole day's worth of salaries for ten, liability insurance coverage, and all the complications and regulations of being an employer. The back hoe costs more per hour than unskilled labor but completes the job in a single hour. Also the quality of the ditch is superior.