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Outsourcing again: Webpage design

I’ve been looking for a company to do webpage design for me now. I’m looking for something on-par with http://www.guildwars.com or http://www.worldofwarcraft.com. Pretty high standards, but this is my main marketing venue other than graphics. One thing I’ve found is you can get a pretty good idea of the quality of a company in the […]

I’ve been looking for a company to do webpage design for me now. I’m looking for something on-par with http://www.guildwars.com or http://www.worldofwarcraft.com. Pretty high standards, but this is my main marketing venue other than graphics.

One thing I’ve found is you can get a pretty good idea of the quality of a company in the first 5 minutes. How quickly do they respond to an inquiry? Do they ask intelligent questions? Are they going to detail their work, or do the bare minimum to meet the requirements?

I don’t have that big of a sample set yet, but from what I’ve seen US companies are a lot more likely to ignore inquiries than foreign countries. I think the foreign countries are hungrier for your dollars (which is good).

Maybe it’s just bad luck with Brazil, but for 2 / 2 times I’ve talked to companies there now, they’ve tried to take advantage of me. First was the art team that wanted $60K to do the art to me, the equivalent of $240K in US purchasing power. Just nuts. Then I spoke to a web design firm, who while professional, wanted $11K for the website at $25 an hour. In terms of purchasing power, again that’s like asking for $100 an hour, which is unreasonable. Why would I bother outsourcing to be charged US rates? Also the hours don’t make sense – they put down 320 hours for the coding alone. How the heck does writing HTML take 320 hours? The art, I can see it, because time = quality. HTML is trivial though.

I’ve gotten pretty good responses from India, the Ukraine, and especially the US. When my inquiries are not ignored, I seem to get the most intelligent and professional responses from the US, and the best service. The prices are higher, but are are still surprisingly often competitive with other countries. I think this is because the other countries tend to raise their rates up to US standards, rather than charging what is locally competitive. But with some extra work I’ve found I can still find the good deals and get good quality work done (as per my current art team).

2 replies on “Outsourcing again: Webpage design”

I am a web designer and it sounds like you are getting ripped off. I would say with artwork, html, css, and script that you should be paying 6-7k at the very most. If you could provide some images you would cut this price down dramatically. And the designer has two good templates to work from since you provided to examples.

If you want some more advice go to my blog and contact me.

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