In this three parts article Outsource Fitch will explore some of the obvious and less obvious benefits of outsourcing web development. The content is focused on digital agencies, ad agencies and the likes aiming to position remote staff to work directly to their business.
The article is organised in 3 parts: Outsourcing and Remote Staff, Benefits of Outsourcing, Tips and Recommendations.
Outsourcing Web Development and Remote Staff
It’s no news to anyone that the web development world has tremendously expanded over the past several years, and it doesn’t seem to be shrinking. If you’ve been in the web development field any length of time, you probably realize how much this field has grown and changed.
Simple HTML for many web developers is a thing of the past. Who would have thought that so many programming languages would be invented in such a short period? From simple HTML to PHP, CSS, Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the list goes on and on!
These days to build a proper web platform to compete or launch a new business will require several technical skills. Many of these skills are difficult to find in Australia, making it outsourcing overseas a compelling option for businesses and entrepreneurs needing to get the job done.
Outsourcing, although not new to the business world, has quickly become a familiar term in the web development field for this very reason. It gave businesses the opportunity to hire web developers in the Philippines with ease and for a lower cost. Hence the very reason for the foundation of our firm Outsource Fitch bringing the expertise of local filipino developers to world class standards.
Your Niche Web Development Skills
This is specially relevant for digital agencies servicing customers’ websites. This type of business will come across a large variety of skill requirements from PHP to Ruby on Rails. However, generally one web developer has an area of expertise that they’re very familiar with and have performed often. If you took web development in college, you probably focused on just a couple of aspects of development. No one college course teaches all the methods and languages. Perhaps you are very savvy with PHP and have created many websites using PHP. Of course, there are plenty of potential customers in the PHP department, but what if you could expand to other areas of web development that you know little about?
Expanding without Additional Training
Perhaps you’ve had the terrible experience of turning clients away simply because you didn’t have the skills necessary to complete their web project. If you’ve had to do this, don’t be too hard on yourself. Nobody has every skill in web development, but everyone in web development has at least one or a few skills!
You might ask, “How can I expand my business or extend services in areas where I’m not an expert?” As mentioned above, outsourcing has become a familiar term in the web development world for this very purpose. Outsourcing gives you an opportunity to expand your business without going to school for more training. Several digital agencies in Australia are going down that path. This is what the team at Light Media in Melbourne has done “We struggled for many years trying to get developers in Australia and keep them after. Once we learnt how to run a development team remotely from the Philippines we have never gone back. We have grew our business from 2 developers to 30 today with happy clients and a profitable business” says Renato Dayan co-founder at Light Media.
In this first part the aim is to help you establish whether you need to outsource your technical work. There are situations where you might want to keep the development in your local office as this might be a client requirement or any other strategic reason. Here is a list of items to consider when making a decision between Outsourcing or hiring locally:
- Is cost a consideration?
- Can you find the professionals with skills requirement?
- How much of the project budget you want to allocate to development?
- Are you doing an MVP?
- Do you need to scale up the team quickly as the project grow?
- Can you use an established b2b and b2c ecommerce software, in which the outsource team has experience with?
Answering these questions will definitely clarify whether outsourcing is the best solution for your business and situation. Once that has been established, let’s understand the benefits for outsourcing by hiring remote staff in the Philippines.
Outsource Fitch – your web developer outsourcing partner in the Philippines.