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Cousin Jimmy is 17 years old and fancies himself.... as a budding web developer. Not yet out of secondary school, he is yet to have any formal training or work experience, but has dabbled in some code when he's not playing computer games. At the annual Christmas family do, you mention that your company needs a new web design. He offers to do it for you. You're tempted.
Now, I’m sure that cousin Jimmy is a nice enough person and I’m sure he’d save you a hell of a lot of money. After all, he needs a job, so you may as well get a cheap as chips website at the same time… right? Errm, hold that thought.
There are many differences between hiring an established agency to create your website and giving cousin Jimmy the gig, and I’m here to inform you that the differences don’t stop at the price.
Firstly there is the team work. While little Jimmy is sat at home hammering away at his keyboard like a real little programmer, he also has to be thinking about design and user experience. And while he is thinking about all that, I should imagine that it is pretty hard to be thinking about whether the project is on schedule, what he needs to do next and how his design and development decisions will affect the optimisation of the site for the search engines like Google and Bing. Let’s face it, if Jimmy had the skills and experience of all the people in every web development team then he’d be some kind of a genius. An overworked and unpaid genius, but let’s not take anything away from Jimmy, because since I invented him I’ve actually grown to like the little guy.
Ok maybe that stuff is a little obvious - of course you get a whole team of professionals working on your website if you go to an agency. And it goes without saying that Jimmy can’t do better than an experienced team all on his own. He’s certainly not going to be breaking any records for meeting deadlines without cutting some fairly substantial corners. But I suppose that is what you get when you want a cheaper website. And maybe you’re happy with having a website that isn’t all singing, all dancing. So long as it works then everything will be ok, you think. But will it, really?
The thing is, when an agency like I-COM builds a website, its employees use their experience to ensure that your website will work everywhere for a long time. What do I mean by 'everywhere'? For example, the I-COM development platform is built to work on the most common server setups with very little dependences. What's more, if you decided to move your website to a new hosting solution then you can, problem free. Another example of your website working everywhere is browser compatibility, but I don’t want to offend Jimmy, I’m sure he knows all about that.
The I-COM platform also allows for changes to be made easily by you, the user. The user can sign into the secure admin area to change content and images effortlessly. Although the user would never see it, the I-COM platform is also easy to change from a programmatic perspective. So making changes on our side doesn’t mean that the whole website falls over like a house of cards. This brings me neatly to my next point. One day little cousin Jimmy will make it big time, he will have a job, car, good looking chick (maybe) and he won’t have time to work on your website. At this point you have no support, which is a huge problem. With a web agency, on the other hand, support is always available to clients and because firms like I-COM work to standards set by web organisations such as W3C and their own standardised coding practices, even if the developer who built your site is no longer working there, another developer can easily pick up where he left off. So you aren’t left with the risk of having a website that will suddenly stop working from time to time.
So now that you are thinking about having your website built, have a think about whether it's really worth trying to cut costs as much as possible. Think about all the potential headaches that could crop up without the expertise of a specialist agency behind you. Then think about the amount of your time that will going into finding someone to fix the damn thing, when it does go wrong. After all, once emergency fixes are done, the web agency that you have finally enlisted to help will just tell you everything you have just read, and convince you to buy from them anyway.
So please don’t have a website made on the cheap. It will be a real waste of money.
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