Outsourcing your web design to India - Cheap and Best?

A few years ago I visited India, and discovered a country rich with culture, diversity and colour. I'm glad I saw the breathtaking beauty and worrying filth of it first hand, becasue I wouldn't want my entire view of the country to be based on my experience with the prolific and relentless Indian web outsourcing companies.

Note - this is a shortened version of the full article, which you can read here on our website.

Some UK based web design companies outsource their coding to India, and some clients may even decide to go directly there. However, in our experience, there are many problems that arise with this way of working - that cost far more than the discount benefits.

The first and foremost is the communication problem. I don't demand that everyone I deal with, whether it's business to business or as a consumer, has to have English as their first language. However, I do expect that they have a decent command of the language I'm using if they want to work with me. If I plan to market my products in Germany or Spain, I'll damn well make sure I learn German or Spanish well enough to get my point across.

Unfortunately, with these outsource centres, this is rarely the case. All our communication with them, (when we've tested their services, out of curiosity) have been painful and frustrating, involving circular conversations that achieve nothing, and email volleys that are more confusing than a cryptic crossword.

On top of that, the quality of work we've seen is shoddy and unprofessional, and not anything we'd be willing to put our name to.

I'd like to strongly make the point here that I have no doubt that there are plenty of Indian professionals that speak impeccable English and write beautiful code - however, my guess is that they are working decently paid jobs for reputable companies. The people hired by the majority of the outsource centres are code monkeys with the most basic knowledge, no sense of the bigger picture and minimal English. Because those people will be cheap, and that helps you get your cheap prices.

So, we don't outsource any of our work to underpaid workers, and we consider good communication paramount and not negotiable. Plus, we care about writing elegant, robust code.

You can read more articles about web design, SEO and the like in our resource bank.

Or you can read more about our web design service - including a sexy infographic of the process, here.