How to Outsource Web Development with the Five Steps?

Understanding Web Development Outsourcing

Web development outsourcing has become a strategic choice for businesses aiming to leverage expertise, reduce costs, and accelerate project timelines. In this section, we dive into the essentials of web development outsourcing before going to outsourcing steps in detail.

What is Web Development Outsourcing?

Web development outsourcing is a strategic business practice. There, your company delegates the planning, design, development, and maintenance of your websites or web applications to external service providers. This approach allows your business to tap into the expertise and resources of specialized web development teams, often located in different geographical regions or countries.

Outsourcing comes into three following categories based on geographical locations:

Onshore or Domestic Outsourcing: This means contracting to a company within the same country. For instance, a New York-based company can outsource to a firm in Seattle. This can remove language barriers and make collaboration easier while still benefiting from specialized expertise.

Nearshore Outsourcing: This refers to hiring to a company in nearby country to handle certain tasks. For example, a US company can outsource to Canada or Mexico. This enables better cultural alignment, similar time zones, and easier travel.

Offshore Outsourcing: This means contracting work to a company in a distant country. For example, a US company can outsource web development to Vietnam. This allows for lower labor costs and favorable economic conditions.

Regardless of your choice, consider your business goals, project requirements, and available resources first. Then, evaluate the expertise, experience, and communication capabilities of potential companies. Also, look through reviews or clients testimonials and ask for recommendations to choose the best partner for your web development project.

Why do You Need Web Development Outsourcing?

According to Statista, the global IT outsourcing market is predicted to reach a staggering value of over USD 541 billion in 2024. It then continues to expand at a CAGR of 8.48% during the forecast period 2024-2029, leading to a revenue of more than USD 812 billion by 2029. Of which, all kinds of IT outsourcing, including web development, have increasing in the market volume.

This indicates that the demand for outsourcing also increases accordingly. Why? It’s because outsourcing provides numerous advantages that make it an appealing choice for businesses of all sizes. Here are some of those benefits:

1. Cost Reduction

When a company chooses to outsource web development, cost savings are often a key factor. Outsourcing is generally cheaper than hiring an in-house team. Setting up an in-house team involves significant expenses, including hiring costs, health insurance, payroll taxes, benefits, and necessary software and technology.

Finding and retaining skilled developers for an internal team can be time-consuming and costly. By paying an outsourced development firm a fixed rate or retainer, your company can achieve more work at a lower cost. This approach also allows your organization to focus on other priorities.

Recommended reading: 6 Tips to Choosing Custom Web Development Company

2. Access to a Larger Pool of Talents

Outsourcing allows you to access a broader range of talent. Web development firms often build teams of experienced and skilled experts to remain competitive. Reviewing a company’s testimonials, references, and case studies can help you find top professionals.

Outsourcing isn’t just about cost savings; it’s also about finding the best experts for your project. In-house hiring is limited by your budget, but outsourcing gives you access to a global talent pool.

Outsourcing web development companies try to stay competitive by putting together teams of skilled and experienced experts. If you do a thorough analysis of the company’s testimonials, letters of reference, and case studies, there is a good chance that you will be able to hire a group of real experts in the field.

3. Enhanced Security and Risk Management

Partnering with a reputable and experienced web development company can improve your website’s security. In today’s tech landscape, website security is crucial for your business and your users.

A well-established firm can assess your website’s security measures and recommend improvements. This helps protect your site from potential attacks and minimizes risks to your business.

4. Reduced Administrative Burden

By outsourcing web development, your company can significantly reduce administrative tasks related to maintaining an internal development team. This allows your company to bypass the complex process of recruiting, onboarding, and continuously training employees. Not to mention that staff turnover can lead to disruptions in projects and additional costs for rehiring and retraining.

Instead, these responsibilities fall on the outsourcing partner. The partner normally has streamlined processes and specialized expertise in managing technical talent. For this reason, your company can minimize or eliminate relevant HR management tasks. HR and management teams then can focus on more strategic initiatives that directly contribute to your business’s growth.

5. Focus on Core Competencies

Outsourcing web development frees up your internal resources to concentrate on core business activities. These core competencies can be product development, marketing, and customer service. In other words, your team can dedicate their time and energy to areas where they excel and add the most value. For this reason, you can streamline operations and improve productivity in these crucial areas.

While external professionals handle web development on your behalf, you gain access to the latest tech, cutting-edge solutions, and best industry practices. This ensures that your web project is implemented with a high level of expertise and efficiency. As a result, your website can be of high quality and go to market faster.

Recommended reading: A Detailed Guide for Web Development Cost

How to Outsource Web Development Effectively?

With all the mentioned benefits, it’s beneficial to work with a skilled website development company that offers outsourcing services. However, choosing the wrong outsourcing agency might ruin your web development project, let alone financial losses and reputation damage. Based on our experience working with different web projects across various industries, here are our tips to help you outsource web development effectively:

Recommended reading: How to Choose a Web Design Company That Fit Your Business?

1. Assess What You Need

What exactly do you want to achieve with the web development project? Do you need to develop a brand-new website, redesign an existing one, or build a web app? Which functionalities do your target audience prefer to have on your website? Ask these questions and more to define your project requirements clearly.

Further, our advice for you in this step is do thorough market research. This will help you better understand your current industry, potential customers, competitors, and the latest trends. Once you clarify all critical project requirements, you can create a document that details technical requirements, design preferences, user experience (UX) considerations, wireframes or mockups, and any specific tech or platforms to be used.

2. Choose the Right Outsourced Web Development Partner

Next, look for your best partner. Remember that web development is an ongoing process. As the market is constantly changing and you always update the website to meet end-user needs, ongoing maintenance and improvements after launch are a must. So, choosing a web development outsourcing company must consider the possibility of establishing long-term partnership.

The first thing you should consider when choosing the right partner is location and time zone. These factors may affect your web development project in terms of costs and communication. Therefore, decide whether you want to work with a local, nearshore, or offshore development team. Then, evaluate each type’s pros and cons before deciding.

Once you’ve decided the type of outsourcing, look through their proven track record in web development. Check their portfolios and case studies as well on their own websites or third-party review organizations (Clutch or GoodFirms). Accordingly, you can evaluate how extensive your expertise and experience are in your business domain.

We also advise you to directly contact some potential candidates. This gives you a chance to understand their communication skills. In particular, evaluate how they’re responsive to your existing problems and requirements. Further, you should choose a company whose developers can speak English well and communicate well with you on everything.

Communication is equally important during the development process. Ask the outsourcing company for how they keep you updated about what’s going on, how you can track deadlines, etc. For example, while working on the Aha.is eCommerce web development project, we schedule regular meetings to let them informed about the progress or issues and get feedback for enhancement. This helps us avoid misunderstandings and seamless workflows towards the final deliverable.

3. Calculate Budget and Timeframe

The scope of the project, the timeframe, the number of features that need to be built, and your chosen outsourcing company’s level of experience are some of the key things that determine determine how long your project will take. Consider how much your website possibly costs for completion. This depends on different factors, like the outsourcing agency’s location, your chosen service, etc.

To calculate budget and timeframe effectively, we advise you to discuss closely with the outsourcing partner to establish clear project milestones and deliverables. Normally, such companies as Designveloper will leverage Agile frameworks (SCRUM and Kanban) that divide the web project into smaller work to be done in sprints. Each sprint often lasts from one to four weeks, defining which tasks need prioritizing. Also, we use estimation techniques like Pomodoro, Analogous Estimation, or Planning Poker to calculate timeframes and costs needed. All these things help us deliver the final website on time and within budget.

4. Manage Quality & Performance

To ensure the website meets your needs, define quality standards and testing processes. Furthermore, establish a review and approval process for deliverables. This process will help check whether deliverables meet the agreed-upon specifications and quality standards before accepting them. If not, the outsourcing development team needs to make essential adjustments.

Further, as the product owner, you can get involved in the web development process by working collaboratively with the development team. Moreover, offer constructive feedback once you any problems. This ensures your websites can align with your business goals and end-user expectations in terms of functionality, usability, and performance. In the long term, this will foster a positive working relationship between you and the partner.

5. Ensure Legal & Financial Considerations

Finally, draft a detailed contract that clarifies project scope, timelines, payment terms, confidentiality agreements, and even intellectual property rights. In addition, this contract should cover how disputes will be handled.

Another important thing when negotiating contracts is clearly defining payment terms, payment schedules, and conditions for release. These payment terms can include milestone-based payments, fixed price, or hourly rates. Further, both your company and the outsourcing company must be specify which costs will be covered and how to address hidden costs.

FURTHER READING:

1. Top 7 Web Development Companies Review

2. How to Choose a Web Development Company for Your Startup?

3. Why Web Design is Important for Business?

Conclusion

We at Designveloper hope that this article helped you find out how to outsource web development that can help you outsource some of your work. Make a smart choice, because only the company that built your website can make changes or additions with the same speed, quality, and efficiency. If you want more info about outsourcing or web development, subscribe to our blog! But if you want to start off your project now, contact us!