I've been getting a lot of weird spam from Indian web development firms lately. Not the Native American kind, either, which would actually be cool; this is India and her vast resources of hungry web designers come knocking on my door to help me with my web designs. I have two words for you: No.
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Besides, how much does a design start-up on the other side of the world know about high-end American design requirements? Moreover, being on the other side of the world means we're doomed to a Ladyhawk-like existence, never really meeting or talking in person since when I go to bed they wake up.
All of my personal experiences with outsourcing have been at best a waste of time and at worst a waste of money. If the code is dumb or the design trite, there's no way to make it right once they've got your money. All of the communication is via email, which in design can be a challenge since you don't pick up on the details without at least a phone conversation.
The best was the one that claimed that they were "Lected in Web Creme" which took me ten minutes of deciphering before I decided that they were not talking about some bizarre techno-fetish but about being featured in webcreme.com, a pay-for-play awards site. Hey, for thirty bucks I could be lected in web creme, too. Talk to me when one of your sites gets into Adobe's Showcase.
Some of these outfits just want to take my designs and turn them into web pages for me. I guess they think that code is code, and to a large extent they're right. But I hand-code each and every one of my sites because in most cases I create the design knowing exactly how I'd write the code for it, and that usually involves some pretty arcane CSS tricks that I really couldn't trust to anyone else cheaper than me anyway.
What I'd like to do is outsource my project management. How come I never hear from any companies lected in web creme for that?
