Web Development In The House

Build your dream homepage by striking a balance between doing all your web work with an in-house team and having someone else do it all for you.

Your Dream Home

Building your dream homepage is a lot like building your dream home. The thousand little features of your dream home flood your mind as you think about it: The crown molding, the airy windows, the french doors opening out onto the patio, the three-car garage. Indeed, the garage is probably a more important consideration than the french doors, or even than the front door, as 90% of the time, it’s the garage that you’ll be going through to get in.

It’s through the garage that you’ll enter to live, it’s through the garage that you’ll enter to work, and most significantly, it’s through the garage that you’ll enter to work on your house itself until it’s ready for you to move in. Indeed, let’s take the garage as an analogy for your strategy for building and maintaining your house.

Let’s say that one option for construction of your dream house is to hire a bunch of construction workers who will live in one of your garage bays until they get it all built to your liking and that they stay there in case you need them, thereafter.

The second bay would be used by the string of workers flowing into and out of your house performing various jobs from a construction company you hire to finish the house. Which bay is going to serve you better? The dedicated, in-house team, or the outsourced, third-party team of experts contracted to do the job?

Pros and Cons

There are some compelling reasons for managing your web development in either way. My discussion here is certainly not exhaustive, but it may form a good starting place for framing the choice in your mind, and beginning the conversation with your team.

In-house pros

If you’ve got the right team of seasoned web developers hired to do this as part of their job, then you’ll be best served by having them set up and manage your website for you. This is particularly true if that team is currently underutilized. If your team members have the skillset, but are currently engaged in working on things that don’t maximize their abilities, then you’ll probably do best to realign their duties to include setting up and maintaining your website.

This will also result in your having a more immediate control over your website. Walking down the hall to talk to someone about the site is more convenient and immediate than setting up a meeting with your web dev agency.

Also, you can also be more certain that those working on your site take part in and embody your company culture. Your dev agency, on the other hand, could be across the country or across the world. This might result in their culture, and how the represent yours, being significantly different from what it actually is.

If you have an internal team of devs, it may result in your being able to take more ownership of your site, and maybe having more pride in it. Although these last two factors may seem like more sentimental or light-weight benefits, I think it’s likely that they do have a real impact on how your site comes off to your visitors.

The more ownership you take, the more exacting you’re likely to be to make sure it’s just right. Furthermore, the more pride you have in it, the more joy will be apparent in the site itself. Now, you can be exacting with a web development agency, and go to lengths to make sure joy permeates your site when someone else is creating it, too, but it doesn’t come as naturally.

But wait! In-house cons

The converse of the above employee situations are also true: if you don’t already have a team of web development professionals, you’d need to hire them. Or if you have them but they’re already engaged in activities using their skills in important ways, those other activities would likely suffer if you pulled them off those tasks. You’d probably need to hire others to take over the duties no longer performed by your developers. Either way, this could easily end up being more expensive and certainly more disruptive to your business than hiring a competent dev agency.

Furthermore, even if you have a team of individuals with the right skills that you hired, say, six months ago, it is likely that those individuals would need at least some updated training and possibly a considerable amount of it to get them up to speed with new technologies and approaches.

This is so much a fact of life in the web development sphere, that Geeksforgeeks.com calls it out explicitly. They point out that one of the greatest challenges to web development today is “keeping up with the pace of change”.

You can add to that the fact that there are many different aspects of a website that must be considered, beyond just the technology used to create it. I’m talking about search engine optimization, working on the speed of the site, and most significantly in my mind, its broad accessibility.

Each of these considerations, and a dozen others, is an entire area of emphasis that requires a certain level of mastery to execute well, so you’d need people on the team who are already experts in each of these fields, which would take time, money, and effort on your part.

All of this means that while it may seem at first consideration that doing your web work in-house would end up being cheaper, it may actually end up being more expensive.

Outsourced pros

One of the greatest benefits to using a development agency to build and maintain your website is that all of that specific expertise in the various aspects of development we just talked about will already be held by a proficient web development agency. This will all be at your service when you become their client.

There’s a reason that 92% of Forbes’ Global 2000 companies outsource web development. All of an agency’s developers will be up on the latest technologies. They’ll have someone who knows a lot about SEO, another who can tell you the best ways to make sure the site remains speedy, and hopefully yet another who’s great at finding and fixing aspects of the site that may make it difficult for visitors with a variety of disabilities to get what they need from it.

I added a conditional “hopefully” on that last stipulation because sad experience has shown us that not every web dev team has an expert on accessibility, and that, in fact, most don’t. Despite the tremendous importance of web accessibility, most of the bootcamps and schools out there still don’t teach much if anything about web accessibility.

Because of this dearth of default training, you’ll want to make certain that you have some questions about web accessibility in your screening conversation with any prospective dev agency. Further, I’d say the more questions you can ask, and the more specific they are, the better.

It’s easy for an agency to claim that they build sites that adhere to WCAG 2.1 AA. It’s more convincing if they can tell you the top three issues they have to remediate in most of their sites, and what resources they have available to train you to keep the content accessible as you put in your blog posts and other site content. It’s most convincing if they tell you they can do screen-reader testing, and what problems that most often reveals in the sites.

You should take a similar approach to grilling the agencies on the best practices they espouse and commit to in the areas of SEO, speed optimization, mobile-first design, and other areas. Treat your screening of potential dev agencies as seriously as you would the interview of a job applicant.

By doing this you’re likely to be able to tell whether they’re really the experts they claim to be in those various areas. If they’re not, you can still work with them, but you may need to negotiate the price down to give you enough room in your budget to engage agencies that specialize in the various deficient services.

For other tips on choosing a good web agency, see Wes’s post, “Online dating, or how to hunt for the perfect web agency”.

But wait! Outsourced cons

Unfortunately, outsourcing your web development may result in your having less ownership in the project, and the product. The product in this case is your website. Your website is supposed to be an extension of your corporate personality, indicating to visitors who you really are. Any decrease in control or ownership could be problematic.

Firmly committing yourself to being organically involved in the website-creation process can create its own set of challenges. Unless you’re careful you may find the project cost ballooning. In this event you may not realize some of the financial benefits of having an agency do your web development rather than hiring a team to do it.

Here at SeaMonster Studios we frequently find ballooning project costs when a client wants to be extremely involved in the process, and goes about it in the wrong way. This is often the case with clients who adopt the I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it mentality.

Some clients have a sense of what they want their site to look or feel like, but don’t take the time to sit down and articulate what they want and why. This results in our flying blind when we create designs and develop components for them that may or may not end up fitting the bill. If they don’t, our clients will have to pay for another round of our creating components that may not satisfy.

Pop that balloon by being clear in your own mind about exactly what you want and why, and explaining it expansively to the dev agency. It may help to consider sites in your industry and find examples that you like or dislike. Get these with your notes on why you do or don’t like them to your dev agency. This will help them include, in the designs and later in the development, those practices that you like, and avoid the ones you don’t.

If your dream house has two bays in the garage, with one dedicated to housing your internal team of builders, and one dedicated to accommodating a web dev agency as they pull in, work, and pull back out, you’ll do well to consider carefully which garage bay to use. But wait! There’s another possibility. Your house has a third option, a third bay you can use if you’d like.

Third Bay

The third bay in your three-car garage is to have a web dev agency build it for you, but with you providing all the content, and with the stipulation that you will be managing all the content changes to the site going forward. In this model, the build itself is a fairly involved process, where you provide thoughts and guidance all along the way to a competent dev shop. The shop, in its turn, plans from the beginning a simple process of content management for you to follow once they’re done with the initial build.

This model strikes a balance between doing all your web work yourself and hiring all of it out. The initial build is where the greatest technical knowledge is required. On the other hand, the content management is where the greatest number of labor hours will be spent over the life of the site.

Following the blended model, therefore, will result in your hiring out the technical knowledge rather than having to acquire it, but on the other side, providing the day-to-day manipulation of the site rather than having to pay for it. The result will be the lowest overall cost. The potentially higher initial cost will be canceled out over time by the lower operating cost.

In order to take advantage of this third-bay approach to creating your home, you’ll need a good dev agency that is proficient at building sites that use a content-management system, or CMS. Nearly 50% of websites use the CMS of either Wordpress or Shopify, so we recommend you find a dev shop specializing in one or both of those.

If you’re going to be doing the content management, though, it’s not enough that your dev shop be experts at building with a CMS; it’s also essential that they have a plan to get you up to speed on the best methods for managing the content. They should give you clear in-person training (through Zoom is okay) on how to do it. They should also give you a list of written procedures that you can follow to make sure the content management goes as smoothly as possible.

Your procedures document should also take special note of those things you’ll need to do to make sure your site stays accessible. In Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (/2022/09/01/accessibility-monitoring) I said that once you’ve got an accessible site you should take pains to ensure that it stays that way, and to do this you must ensure that any new content you put in is as accessible as the rest. Following the procedures that take into account principles of accessibility is the best way to do this.

Construction Cleanup

Any of the three options for the division of labor for your website can work. Your company might have a whole experienced team of web developers who can put your site together and maintain it. On the other hand, you may have nobody on staff who knows anything about the web or technology generally and you can outsource all your web work.

More likely, though, while you may not have a team of experts in all aspects of web development on staff, you may have people on staff who can learn the skills to manage new content on your site in an efficient and accessible way. We’d say that the majority of companies would benefit from this blended model, which has the benefit of generally lower costs and a greater likelihood of maintaining your brand voice.

You probably don’t need to have a whole team of web dev experts living in your first garage bay. You also probably don’t need to have a web dev agency continually pulling into and out of your second bay for every tiny change to your site. Instead, you can plan on having the dev shop making continual use of the third stall while building your home, but then only coming into it infrequently thereafter when you need a substantial change that your internal team of content managers can’t perform themselves.