Brother-in-law, Freelancer or Agency

Who should you trust with your application?
Who should you hire to create your website or store?

Website or Online Store The Key to Your Business's Success

Computerization of the economy is not the future, but the present. A well-made website will allow you to attract customers and increase your company's revenue. On how to check a website, he writes more extensively in the article: Test your application!. In today's post, however, I will try to briefly describe the most popular website contractors, the pros and cons of each solution, and my own original concept.

Who will make my website?

Let's start with the selection of the contractor. Cooperation with many agencies or freelancers in my career has allowed me to notice recurring patterns of activities and their advantages and disadvantages. Making a website involves hiring a minimum of one person, but the optimal solution is to hire a trio of specialists: a Graphic Designer, a Fullstack and a Copywriter. About potential costs of making a website, I write in the following post: How much does a website cost?. Now that we know who we should hire, let's focus on the options we have to choose from. Throughout the article, let's assume a growing sorting by the price of the services performed:

By yourself

If you want to do something well - do it yourself. Well right, but the situation gets complicated when we need to create a well-optimized web application that will be the key to our success. We can, of course, do it ourselves using off-the-shelf solutions available on the market, but we have to reckon, however, that unless you are a talented designer or developer, your website will contain a lot of shortcomings that you may not even realize. There are better and worse solutions on the market, and we can use the knowledge contained in the article to verify them: Test your application!. I strongly advise against using "wizards" like Wix or Elementor. It's best to find professional software made available for free, such as Compsoul. Ending this long-winded digression, let's move on to the pros and cons of working on the site yourself:

Pros of the solution:
  • No labor costs
  • Basic ability to use the application we have chosen
Minuses of the solution:
  • Lack of competence
  • Risk of choosing an inadequate solution
  • Incorrect or lack of optimization
  • Expansion of the site at a later date may prove unprofitable or impossible
  • Use of harmful programming practices
  • Appearance of the application
  • Banal and uninteresting content or advertising slogans like: "Sausage from Your age".

Brother-in-law

Someone from the family, someone who knows computers, installed Windows for me or used to work in a call center. The contractor is by far the cheapest of the bunch, and the scheme may be as follows: installing a CMS instance (most often it will be WordPress), entering the target content, possibly installing a skin. The solution is ideal as long as I or a person of my ilk is your brother-in-law. Being serious, it should be noted that your website is your best salesman. So if the person who performs such an important endeavor for you is unprofessional, he or she may do your business more harm than good. Of the two evils, if you are to have a botched website, it is better not to have one at all. Because when you don't have your sales person then at least you know you need to hire someone. However, what happens when you hire an unprofessional person?

Pros of the solution:
  • Low labor cost
Minuses of the solution:
  • Lack of competence
  • Risk of the contractor choosing an inadequate solution
  • Incorrect or no optimization
  • Expansion of the site at a later time may prove unprofitable or impossible
  • Use of harmful programming practices
  • Inability to draw consequences from the contractor
  • Basic knowledge required to verify the work done
  • Appearance of the application

Freelancer

This term is a gross oversimplification and kindly assumes that the person you choose will be a professional. A freelancer is a programmer who works full time and makes extra money after hours, a person who runs a one-person interactive agency, or a specialist who is a freelancer (I know what you're thinking right now - the fact that someone is a gunner and you're a scales means that you'll be a good match). Hue hue! Unfortunately, no! And it's not because scales don't like shooters, but because "freelancer" describes a person who is not connected to any agency that would mediate between him and your application. The key issue at this point, which will affect the success of the whole business, is your knowledge of people. In the market, you may come across contractors whose location on the Dunning-Kruger effect graph can be expected at the very top left. How do you check out a potential contractor? In my opinion, the best way would be to check his latest work, if only by using the tests described in this article: Test your application!. We can also examine reviews of the contractor, possibly contact  a former client asking for references. The advantages and disadvantages of this solution, assuming we hit on a qualified person, seem to be as follows:

Pros of the solution:
  • Average cost of work
  • Application made in accordance with good programming and graphic design practices
  • Possibility of later expansion of the application
  • Optimization of the application
  • App appearance of the application
  • Once the contracts are properly drawn up, the ability to enforce its content
  • Invoice that we will be able to include in the costs
Minuses of the solution:
  • Average labor cost
  • You must independently supervise the entire workflow of the project
  • Required basic knowledge to verify the work done
  • You need to hire several people whose cooperation you should supervise

Interactive agency

This is a group of experts working on your application. With management and workflow solutions, they will take you out of the responsibility of overseeing your application and verifying it. Would this mean that all I have to do is pay and I'll have a super site? Unfortunately, no. Here I would like to cite a conversation with a project manager friend who started his own agency. Noticing that the social status of the individual in question had risen significantly, I asked him about his business model. In response, I received: "You take a ready-made WP, install it, hire juniors and sell it as a professional tool." At the moment, I no longer maintain contact with this man. I would like to point out that an interactive agency needs to make a profit - this is obvious. So if its offer is overpriced, it may be due to the lower quality of the services performed. If you care about the quality of the software, and you should, you can hire an expert to give an opinion on your application. Pros and cons of working with interactive agencies:

Pros of the solution:
  • A team of programmers and graphic designers who can consult among themselves
  • Responsibility of the company over the entrusted application
  • Supervision of project managers over the application development process
  • Guaranteed support, as long as the agency still exists
  • App appearance of the application
  • Speed of implementation (the whole team of programmers and graphic designers can be involved in the process of application development)
  • Comprehensiveness of services
Minuses of the solution:
  • High price of services offered
  • Agency doesn't always make good software
  • Tendency to tie the client down (we may have so many services purchased that it will be uneconomical to change agencies)

Who would I choose?

I would like to present the summary in the form of my personal thoughts: that is, who would I personally choose if I wanted to create a professional website on a limited budget:

  • Fullstack - myself, or alternatively I would find a person of my own kind, working full-time in an agency, who would make applications for me as an additional job. I would check her latest realizations with automated tests and try to sign a contract, or I would ask for a VAT invoice, as quite a number of full-time programmers have a B2B contract.
  • Web Designer - I would ask an interactive agency, possibly one of my graphic design friends. For example, this one. Considering that people of this ilk earn a lot, with a good drink I would make him realize that money is not the most important thing. :)

Finally already - we must not forget about the people who would be worth hiring for the purpose of promoting our site. While a well-written application will be a big help to the SEO person, we must not forget that the application needs to be supervised, updated and promoted online. We can have the best written application that will look like a million dollars, but if our offer is not found by users then only the closest family members will know about the existence of our application. No one else.