Editors note:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wanted to introduce you to a new contributor to the magazine, Clinton R. Lanier, a fellow educator who has agreed to share some of his practical web design knowledge with a series of articles. This is the first.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading,<\/p>\n

Stefan Mischook<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

\u201cI make everything in-house!\u201d<\/p>\n

As the owner of a web-design business, hearing this exclamation from competitors puts a smile on my face. As a web design instructor, however, I admonish my students for the same declaration. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why so many web designers feel the need to try to make everything themselves. Maybe it\u2019s the innate creativity flowing through their veins, or the fact that web design is a very artistic enterprise. Whatever the case, the philosophy that everything on a website should be proprietary costs designers time and money.<\/p>\n

The reason is simple: reinventing the wheel\u2014creating your own solution to a design problem instead of purchasing an already-made solution\u2014does not give you the return on investment that you\u2019d see by using a third party\u2019s solution. This is true for every business, but especially so for web designers. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a simple case to illustrate this point. Let\u2019s say you have a client that is going to pay you $2000.00 to design an e-commerce website with an online catalog, a shopping cart and a checkout mechanism. You could spend your own time to make this portion of the site, or you could purchase an off-the-shelf component. <\/p>\n

Now imagine you find the component you need for $500.00 (companies like ecommercetemplates.com sell customizable solutions for as low as $149.00). Is it worth it to buy the product rather than make it yourself? <\/p>\n

Well, now let\u2019s say it would take you 20 hours to make the component yourself. If you do the math, you\u2019re making $25.00 per hour to create the component you could otherwise buy for the $500.00. If you save yourself the 20 hours to work on or find another project, you could end up generating much more income in the long run through the volume of projects you\u2019re able to complete.<\/p>\n

The number of solutions available is enormous, and chances are you can quickly find just about anything you may need at a cost-effective price. The most numerous, perhaps are templates, which are usually available free or for a reduced cost by websites hoping to get you there to increase the number of page views for advertising revenue. Often the freebies require you keep the developer\u2019s copyright logo at the bottom, but by spending a bit you can buy the right to erase their name and replace it with your own. Templates are especially smart to think about because they\u2019re so easily modified, thus simple adjustments to the style sheets or the HTML pages will change the look dramatically.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a good idea to shop for and buy royalty free images. I\u2019ve seen many designers\u2014including, sadly, some of my own students\u2014have to cough up money or pull down sites because they ripped images off of Google or some other place. Paying money to a third party for source images shuffles the copyright responsibility off to them, and you\u2019ll have recourse if it turns out the image is copyrighted elsewhere. And like all other third-party solutions a primary rationale for buying royalty free images is to save you time (and therefore, money) and to additionally get a good quality product. <\/p>\n

Not to pitch for anyone, but I personally use istockphotography.com for images that I\u2019m confident won\u2019t get me sued when I use them on sites. They also sell Flash videos, music and vector graphics. Like the templates, the products can be modified after you\u2019ve purchased them. I\u2019ve actually never used an image I\u2019ve bought without first cropping or in some other way editing it. Thus, I\u2019m pretty sure the image I finally end up with on my site won\u2019t closely resemble images on other sites.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Flash, there\u2019s nothing I hate more than wasting time making a Flash intro movie or menu when I could be doing something else. I\u2019m a bit biased against Flash, to be sure, but many customers want it, and for some reason there\u2019s a belief by those same customers that Flash products justifiably add 25% to the cost. I won\u2019t complain when the customers up-sell themselves, but like other components of a website I try to get around doing it myself. Websites like flashcomponents.net sell just about any Flash-oriented component you could want, including slideshows, menus or whole site templates: and when compared to the time it\u2019d take you to create a custom component, they\u2019re quite affordable.<\/p>\n

To explain my disdain for Flash, let me just say that I\u2019m not what you\u2019d call a Flash expert: I\u2019m more comfortable with other aspects of site design and development. This, though, brings up yet another point to support using third-party solutions. I\u2019ve noticed in my own students that for some reason they seem to gravitate towards different aspects of design\/development. I have on a team of developers right now an individual who is about the best PhotoShop mock-up person I\u2019ve ever seen, and he\u2019s definitely above-average on Flash. But, he\u2019s nearly illiterate when it comes to PHP (and just, \u2018okay\u2019 on CSS). However, another member of the team is a whiz on PHP and CSS, but only passable with PhotoShop and Flash.<\/p>\n

The lesson here is that you can\u2019t be an expert in everything. Yet if you are going to design\/develop websites professionally you are expected to be a \u201cJack of all trades.\u201d And this, in addition to the time-savings (leading to a higher ROI for both time and money) and the customizability of third-party solutions, is the next most important reason to consider using what someone else has made. In any of the sites I\u2019ve used for example purposes here the products are the result of people who are masters at that particular tool. I guarantee that PHP experts are not spending their time making Flash components, and vice versa. <\/p>\n

Some designers think that perhaps taking this approach makes them appear more like an amateur and less like the professional they want to be. But consider this: many larger technology corporations use this same approach. While working for IBM years ago I witnessed them go through a dilemma. While they had the DB2 product\u2014a great enterprise-sized database tool\u2014they needed a dedicated, online storage manager. Their solution? Partner with Tivoli and co-develop the Tivoli Storage Manager in order to customize the features of both it and their own proprietary product. They took the same approach to Lotus and a whole host of other products (which they eventually purchased, but the point remains).<\/p>\n

Perhaps a better example is that of Adobe. In his book, Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton\u2014a designer for Microsoft Corporation\u2014points out that of all of the applications sold by Adobe, only two were created in-house. ONLY TWO!!! Aside from Illustrator and Acrobat, every other application Adobe puts its name on was created by another company and then bought by Adobe. <\/p>\n

Thus, there\u2019s no need to feel like relying on third-party solutions makes you less of a designer\/developer. Instead, rest easy in the knowledge that doing so is actually the same strategy used by big industry.<\/p>\n

Personally speaking, I take this approach when I develop sites. For example, I do much of my work with the open-source CMS, Joomla. The wonderful thing about Joomla is not that the main component is free or powerful, but that so many extensions have been written for this primary system that functionality and modification is made super-simple. With just a few small tweaks of already existing components, I can have an online gallery or an online catalog (or both). If I spent the time making from scratch what others have already created, I\u2019d end up losing in the long run.<\/p>\n

One caveat, however, must be discussed before closing. While using third-party solutions is a great business strategy, ethics demands you not mislead your clients. If they ask for, and you charge them for, from-the-ground-up customized solutions, well then you\u2019re obligated to deliver the same. I\u2019ve found most clients don\u2019t care as long as you\u2019re charging them an honest fee to begin with and the final product does what you\u2019ve promised and they want.<\/p>\n

Thus, embrace the third-party solution. Revel in the fact that you can with confidence promise clients just about anything under the sun on their website and then deliver quality, professional solutions you didn\u2019t even have to make. The time-savings will lead to better revenue in the long run. And that, I guess, is the bottom line, right?<\/p>\n

About the author:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Clinton R. Lanier is an Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at New Mexico Tech, and the owner of Lanier Infomedia (http:\/\/www.lanier-infomedia.com), a web design\/development and technical communication consulting company located in Las Cruces, NM, USA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI make everything in-house!\u201d<\/p>\n

As the owner of a web-design business, hearing this exclamation from competitors puts a smile on my face. As a web design instructor, however, I admonish my students for the same declaration. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why so many web designers feel the need to try to make everything themselves. Maybe it\u2019s the innate creativity flowing through their veins, or the fact that web design is a very artistic enterprise. Whatever the case, the philosophy that everything on a website should be proprietary costs designers time and money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}