{"id":192,"date":"2007-03-07T04:14:44","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T08:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rakkar.org\/blog\/?p=192"},"modified":"2007-03-07T04:14:44","modified_gmt":"2007-03-07T08:14:44","slug":"outsourcing-again-webpage-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/03\/07\/outsourcing-again-webpage-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Outsourcing again: Webpage design"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tI’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<\/a> or http:\/\/www.worldofwarcraft.com<\/a>. Pretty high standards, but this is my main marketing venue other than graphics.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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).\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}