Information Technology -- Website Strategy

Information Technology -- Website Strategy

Website Creation -- in-house vs. Outsourced Design

Virtually every type of contemporary business organization in business today maintains a website for online presence. Whereas before the digital age websites were primarily used by high-tech industries, today, even strictly local businesses such as dry cleaners, florists, hair and nail salons, and automotive garages maintain websites. Generally, they serve two principal purposes: providing added convenience to existing customers, and increasing customer bases by promoting the business online to prospective customers who might not become customers without finding the business in their online searches.

Naturally, the decision to rely on in-house resources to create and maintain the website is a much more economical approach than outsourcing those tasks to dedicated IT specialists working in the field of website design. Certainly, not every business website necessarily requires the expense of outsourcing; on the other hand, outsourcing does provide many advantages that could make the choice to rely on in-house resources counterproductive. In some situations, the entire venture is best left to professional website creators; in other situations, it may make more sense economically to rely on in-house resources, at least for certain aspects of the website if not necessarily for the entire project.

Factors Relevant to the Decision

The most relevant factors to the decision will be those that relate to the complexity of the functions necessary for the site to serve its main purpose. More specifically, the organization must consider the requirements of the website in relation to the skills and abilities of its in-house staff. Organizations whose websites will be expected to conduct complex transactions such as scheduling services or filling orders that have a high degree of specificity will require professional website design and maintenance to ensure that those functions are supported by the website. Translating complex functions into computer code is well outside of the capabilities of non-professionals.

Conversely, organizations whose websites do little besides help establish a searchable web presence to direct prospective customers to brick-and-mortar establishments, or whose websites need to support only a small variety of relatively simple, one-dimensional orders (such as quantity and color preferences of a small number of products) may very well be able to minimize the cost of web creation. Generally, they may still require information technology (IT) professionals to help them launch the website and create its most essential features. However, unlike business organizations that require highly sophisticated websites capable of supporting a large number and variety of complex functions, they may be able to purchase web creation services in an ad-hoc manner. For example, the organization may be capable of providing the artwork and logos in a form that only requires that they be translated into an online medium as opposed to designed from scratch. Likewise, they may be able to rely on in-house resources to draft all of the website copy instead of paying high fees for web design writers to create the informational content of the website.