Small businesses often find it a challenge to generate hype or market their products and services to the masses. A primary reason for that is that they are not ready to invest in a website for their Web development business.
In fact, studies show that less than 64% of all small businesses have a website, which is quite alarming. While some attribute this to the difficulty in finding the right web development partnership, several owners hesitate because they fail to see the importance of having a web presence.
A business website can generate quite a few potential sales leads, which can be intuitively nurtured into long term business relationships. Additionally, today there are tons of e-commerce and digital services that small businesses can offer to their customers through a website.
Such services offer convenience and comfort for customers to transact with your business from the comfort of their homes and make secure payments.
Now comes the important question:
How do I find the right web development agency to build a website for my small business?
For successfully navigating the world of internet-enabled web commerce, small businesses need a technology partner with the skills needed to build efficient, scalable, and robust web experiences for their customers.
So how can you find a hiring agency that has the technology expertise needed for your unique business model? Or even more, the correct question that should be in your mind is: what are the factors to be considered while choosing a web development partner for your enterprise website?
Here are a few tips that will lead you to a great web development partnership:
Try going with an Offshore web development partner.
For a small business organization, there will be a huge constraint on cost with regards to IT budgets as their core operations need more focus. This is when you choose to partner with an offshore web development agency can be a game changer.
By moving your website development offshore to countries like India, where an extremely skilled workforce is available cost-effectively. This is really important as you get more financial resources to focus on your core operations rather than worrying about technology costs.
Thanks to flexible payment options, sustainable and transparent work contracts, and a large portfolio of successful client engagements, partnering with the right offshore web development agency can deliver the best web experiences for your small business at a fraction of the cost involved if you were to focus on onshore web development.
Looking for Responsive website Design & Development ?
We have helped thousands of business owners from all around the world with their website Design & Development.
Pick the right sized team for Web development.
Once you have decided on an offshore web development partnership for your website initiative, the next step is to evaluate skilled teams. There are companies with staff sizes ranging from 10 to 100,000 that you can see when you are looking for a technology partner.
The best option is to opt for a premium yet boutique web design agency with a nominal staff strength of under 100 people. The reason is cost efficiency, as such agencies would be focusing on a smaller number of clients, thereby providing you with more dedicated services and dedicated developers.
Since their payroll list is not large, their billing terms would also be proportionally advantageous to your small business. It will be easier to maintain a long-term partnership with a web development agency with a smaller team size, and this will be beneficial for your future digital aspirations as well.
Look for Transparent Project management.
Any software or web development activity you assign to a technology partner needs to be executed in a professional and reliable manner. The best way to check whether this best practice is followed is to ensure that your web development agency has a good project management platform incorporated into their development initiatives.
By assigning specific workloads, splitting large tasks, tracking progress, conforming to budget and timeline delivery schedules, empowering dependent task execution, etc., a transparent project management platform can ensure that your enterprise web development activity is carried out in a world class manner.
It also ensures that budgets and the scope of development are tightly managed without causing any kind of disruption to the execution timeline. The more efficiently your web development partner does project management, the greater will be the trust levels that build in your relationship over the long term.
Analyze the portfolio for the best fit.
From the several offshore web development agencies you may find today to build your website, a key tip to finding the right one is to explore their portfolio. Examine the quality of the work they have done.
Ask for referrals from customers who have worked with them in the past, and see how they maintain relationships with those customers. It is important to confirm that the web development agency you hire also provides long term support for your website, as periodic market trends may require your website to undergo considerable changes.
Another important aspect you need to check while evaluating portfolio quality is the experience that they have in your business domain. Look for work they have done for similar small businesses and see if it is similar to your expectations. For example, if you want to build an e-commerce business for your small pharmacy store, look for portfolios with similar e-commerce expertise where all business aspects have already been covered for another customer.
Evaluate Credibility
Most agencies might claim that they have years of experience and thousands of man-hours of expertise in multiple web development technologies and frameworks.
While it is difficult to ascertain and validate each of these claims, here is an important tip to deal with ambiguity in this regard: ask for certifications.
Look for companies where employees are certified in multiple web technologies. These certifications are a demonstration of their quality and stress on best practices.
You can also request technical interviews with their staff, but that will require you to have someone very knowledgeable at your end. Hence, the best way to validate their claims of expertise is to verify the certifications and testimonials they received from other customers, as explained in the previous point.
Audit Payment and Service Catalogue
It is easy to get carried away by carefully marketed price structures quoted by many web development agencies. You need to have a thorough examination of their pricing structure and get confirmation on the services you are provided under that price scheme.
An ideal web development partner should be able to provide services that include requirement gathering, design iterations, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Ensure that you get a transparent quote with specifics on all these individual elements.
Make sure that these are well documented in your contractual agreements and that work efforts are tracked for each of these in the project management tool to which you also have access and visibility.
Conclusion
Choosing the right web development agency to partner with for your small business is not an easy task and requires careful evaluation and consideration of all the factors we covered. But the most important thing for small business owners to understand is that they need to put up a web presence to survive in today’s fiercely competitive market conditions.
Hence, the technology partner you select should be able to deliver a quality website or web application for your business. The quality aspect is more important than the cost involved because websites are investments for the long term. They are the face of your business, and hence any investment you make in this regard will bear fruit in the long run.
So, make up your mind and choose a partner satisfying these considerations. If you are looking for a skilled web development agency to partner with to build unique websites and web applications for your small business, reach out to us to explore how we can be your ideal partner.
