Comments on: Don’t Be Afraid of the Third Party Solutions

By: Stefan Mischook

Stefan Mischook — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:51:51 +0000

Hi,

I’ve used SwishMax in the distant past, it was pretty cool at the time.

Stefan

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:28:48 +0000

Clinton,
Thanks for a great post. I routinely farm out most of my PHP to outside developers, both to save time and because I’m not a good PHP developer. My only comment would be make sure that whoever you hire to do such work is honest and reliable. I’ve got an e-commerce site in development right now that has taken WAY to long to complete simply because the first few guys I went to either tried to leave clandestine back end access to the shopping cart or didn’t know what they were doing. In this instance I was forced to purchase a commercial Zen Cart template and have it customized by the company I purchased it from. Lost a lot of money on that job, (wish I’d read your post first!)
One other note: A neat little solution for simple .swf files (navigation, simple slide shows, scrollers and the like) is the SwishMax
application. VERY user friendly and does not require a great deal of scripting knowledge (no action scripting in fact). Plus it’s very reasonably priced.
I look forward to future posts from you.
Chris

By: Clinton

Clinton — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:59:24 +0000

Daniel,

Great point. The article came to me after talking to a proud young web designer who’d created a God-awful site, but did it all by hand–a fact for which he was so proud (especially the hand-created SQL db). And I guess that’s who I’m focusing on here, but that being said my experience with some of the big guys (okay, just one big guy) showed me that it’s really expediency that often wins out. If IBM didn’t have the talent in-house to get something done, they’d go out and either hire the talent (as a contractor) to accomplish what was needed, or partner with another business to get it done. In either case, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a 3rd party solution because the talent isn’t an ‘IBMer’.

You do bring up a great point in that you shouldn’t promise what you can’t deliver. If a client want’s something, and you don’t have the talent in-house and don’t want to go outside of your shop, you need to be honest and (enter salesman/woman) steer the client to something you CAN deliver (well, maybe not that honest).

Another point is staying ahead of the game. Considering what I do–teach and consult–I have to bust my butt to keep ahead of the fresh new designers, and within the next 5-10 year those new designers I’m talking about will be doing the same thing to keep ahead of their younger competition. I’m sure you see that with the brand new firms that pop up, or the new designers you hire. Stagnating is not an option in what you do.

By: Daniel Westlake

Daniel Westlake — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:50:19 +0000

Good Post Clinton! You make a well reasoned arguement against the ‘we do it all in house’ but failed to mention competitive advantage.

As the web design market gets more and more crowded you have to keep your costs down (and using third party products helps) but you also need to stay ahead of the competition. Surely having the skills you need in-house is important in staying ahead of the curve?

At our studio, we do use third party solutions but draw the line when it comes to outsourcing work. I believe that in a knowledge based industry like web design, you just have to have that knowledge in house to stay ahead of the game.

Cheers.