Coaching For Success
Outsourcing
Professional Web Development – Finding The Right Company
Sep 4th
Having made the decision to get your business online and take advantage of the power of the internet the next step is to get your web site designed and developed. If you have the skill and the knowledge in house to do this, all well and good. But, with most companies trying to keep costs down the trend is to hire a professional web development company or individual to complete the task.
Of course, there’s much more to being successful online than having a good, high performing web site, but, without that, your chances of success are greatly reduced. So, let’s take the first step and look into finding and hiring the right web development company to get your online presence off to a flying start.
Finding The Right Company
The first step is to make sure you check several companies carefully before deciding on the one you’ll use to perform your web development. There are many factors to consider before making your decision, but these are the most important traits of a good professional web development company:
- They can provide an in-depth analysis of business need, and, if appropriate, of current internet presence
- Determine your marketing goals and set objectives to meet the goals by understanding your company’s target segment, developing a profile of your company and establishing your product or services competitive edge as compared to your online competitors
- Help your company stands out from the competition by creating a plan that details target audience, search engine optimization and customer retention
- Provide honest, candid advice as to what works and what doesn’t as far as web site design and development are concerned, and what’s appropriate for your particular company and business, even at the risk of losing the project
- Be prepared to work with you until you’re satisfied with the results provided, regardless of how long it takes. Your satisfaction should be their main concern rather than just turning out a web site as quickly as possible
- Be a full service provider, offering not only web design and development services but also search engine optimisation, assistance with understanding web analytics, etc.
Hiring The Right Company
Now that you’re armed with what you need to know to make the right decision as far as selecting the right web development company for your project, the question then becomes “How do I find the right development company for my project?”.
Here are some tips to follow in finding the company that’s right for you:
- Check with friends and business partners who have established web sites as to their satisfaction with their sites and how they’re performing
- Check search engine results (search for “web development companies”, “website design” and it is always best to add your location i.e. web development company UK or a region like London if you want to be more specific) and research the first 20 or so results, examining the ones that make a good first impression more deeply for the quality of their own site and reviewing testimonials, portfolio, etc.
- Verify the companies short-listed meet the requirements noted above
- Contact them for a quote and note how much information they request upfront and whether or not they request a consultation in order to gain greater insight into your goals and requirements
- Note the speed and detail of the response; a good company knows they’re not the only one in town and will do their utmost to respond fully and rapidly to any request for a quote and/or service submitted to them
- Ask for and check references and verify the quality of the projects they’ve worked on previously
Finding and hiring the right professional web development company is not an easy task, but it is a vital one that should not be taken lightly or entered into without thorough investigation, since the right company can mean the difference between online success and failure for your company.
4 Tips To Help You Outsource Successfully
Aug 21st
As your business grows, the complexity of the tasks involved increases quickly. There are some core business activities, which require greater focus compared to some other non-core business activities that although important are better dealt with by a professional in that area so you can free up time to concentrate on customers.
Reasons to Outsource, Image Courtesy Of EJM.com
As a business, if you are running your own website, there are a few of these activities which can be outsourced. Outsourcing gives you to the freedom to concentrate on being in business not working on all aspects of your business however there are issues that you need to consider before outsourcing your work. This post looks at some of the key points you need to ensure you take care of if your outsourcing exercise is to be successful.
Specify your keywords before outsourcing content
The content of your internet business website must be aligned with your business ethos and at the same time should incorporate Search Engine Optimisation. If you are outsourcing your content development, then you should be very explicit in explaining your business objective and be very exact in specifying the keywords related to your business.
You can make use of various online tools like ‘Google keyword tools’ to find the popular keywords related to your business category. A third party may not be as knowledgeable about your business as you are, so it is better that you give them the keywords which needs to be use in the content. It might take you some time to research this thoroughly but the end results achieved are very effective if the content then becomes more honed to your business.
Get involved in your business website design
The creative part of the website is its overall design. Although a third party web designer may be an expert in this work, he does not know your business so you must specify your requirements fully and in detail on paper for them to follow, this gets ride of the ‘he said, she said’ syndrome.
You should always decide on how you website looks and if it is in keeping with your customers’ viewpoint, if the web designer whats to give you something that your clients will not like i..e a design or flashy swirly etc. Regardless of what the web designer thinks go with your gut you know your customers he does not if they will not like it do not let them put it in.
Any images, videos or links you put on the website must be put in such a way that they represent your true business value. If you have sales and marketing people get them involved in this task as well.
Communication is the key
All the points above are important but will not work unless you ensure you use ‘effective communication’ between the outsourcer and yourself. There must be two-way communication on a regular basis so that both parties understand fully each other’s requirements and expectations.
Communication is also necessary for continuous improvement as per the changing market scenario. All reports must be sought from the outsourcer and should be comprehensive so that you have a paper trail (e-mail trail) to establish quantity and quality of work and also if you decide to go to another outsourcer you can ensure they are not repeating previously covered work.
Any improvements sought for on the outsourced job must be communicated to themin writing as well as verbally for clarity purposes and again for accountability. This should be given in a timely manner so the outsourcer can have plenty of time to incorporate them.
Gauge the Return On Investment beforehand
The objective of outsourcing is to save your time and keep cost whilst doing so to a minimum while extracting the maximum benefit for your company. If you recruit full time staff for tasks then it would not be an economical option for a small business. So, it is imperative for you to decide how much cost you are saving by outsourcing and what are your returns.
You should bear in mind that the profits expected from outsourcing must be higher than the expenses associated with it. At the same time, the quality of your content must not be sacrificed on cost. The return on investment should be measured in terms of the number of visitors to your site, sales and lead generation which should be monitored closely. If you are not able to do this then a good internet business coach or internet consultant will be able to help you to judge the performance of your outsourced work.
Outsourcing SEO tasks helps you to achieve economic efficiency, brings in expertise of the experienced third party players and above all saves your precious time. All you need to do is a bit of homework and some amount of timely monitoring.
Hiring A Freelancer
Jun 12th
Image of Freelancer.com
Running a business is a difficult task as you need to monitor numerous tasks and formulate a strategy to optimise the quality as well as the cost of your business operations. In traditional business all operations are looked after in-house. However, present day businesses deal with many complex operations which can make it hard to look after all of them simlutaneously in an effective manner.
This brings us to the concept of ‘outsourcing’ to a freelancer, which is the process of involving an external party to handle a specifc task for your business. It is basically a contract given to the third party to handle some or possible all the different elements of your business. Outsourcing/freelancing is a recent phenomenon and has many advantages in it.
One of the main objectives of outsourcing to a freelancer is to save on costs. When you hire someone to do a specific task who is already skilled in that area, it can potentially save the administrative and training costs on your part as well as allowing you more time to concentrate on what you do best. Apart from the aforementioned benefits you should also find labour available at a lower cost.
You may not want to hire sometimesfull time as you have no need i.e. you may have a small requirement for a particular project wherein hiring full time employees and getting them trained proves more costly than outsourcing the job to a freelancer. If this is where you are at the first thing to do is clearly identify that task and its specifics so that you can write a clear, concise and informative job post.
No business is expected to have full expertise and specialisation in each and every business operation. The idea of hiring a freelancer is to gain that specialised skill temporarily in order to complete your job. You should accept no less than the industry standard, from your freelancer unless you want to. This can be achieved through interviewing them, asking for proof of qualifications and any industry traing or portfolios, the good freelancers will not mind these questions the bad ones well seem to disappear.
The better freelancers will welcome these questions as they probably perform similar operations for multiple clients, hence it is easier for them to prove the standard of the work output. One of the great things about freelancing is that the freelancer is on a contract that must be completed satisfactorily before they are paid which makes them legally held accountable for the quality of work, clearly more of an advantage than having someone fulltime.
Outsourcing gives you multiple options to choose the best freelancer suitable for your requirements. Once you choose the right organisation or a person to perform your job, you can then concentrate on your core business activities. It also provides you the flexibility in your business strategies. If you want to expand, you can hire third parties on an ad-hoc basis to meet sudden challenges or if later on the size of your business decreases, you can easily stop employent of your freelancer.
Hiring a freelancer allows the inter-mixing of resources including human capital among two or more organisations and hence overall knowledge base of a business expands. Thus, a business can flourish even if it is dependent on hiring freelancers who are not a part of it.
Freelancing has shown very good results in the past and is beneficial for both main business owner and also for the freelancer who might otherwise be unemployed . All you need to do is to identify the job to be performed and then choose from the vast array of sites online to help you find a freelacer i.e. freelancer.com, guru.com, limeexchange.com etc to get the right freelacder for your job.
