As website technology continues to evolve, clients who come to your agency are increasingly requesting feature-rich websites to meet their unique business goals. This includes sophisticated database-driven websites, e-commerce websites, third-party software integrations, and more that require complex back-end coding abilities. Sometimes, it’s best to outsource complex websites to a partner that’s accustomed to taking-on such projects.
In addition, your design team can turn their amazing talent and innovative imagination into ideas for websites that are truly remarkable tools for your clients. These imaginative designs can quickly lead you into a website development scenario that also necessitates highly-customized programming.
And in order to stay desirable, your agency must continue to carve out a valuable position as the creative go-to source for your clients who want something different from what they can do in-house or get from a commoditized, function-limited web design solution like Squarespace.
This means embracing your agency role as a strategic and innovative force for your clients’ growth. It also means that in order to deliver on complex front-end and back-end website programming, you need to choose the right web development partner who can actually deliver on both your clients’ requirements and your designers’ vision.
Below is our list to help you outsource your agency website development successfully.
#1: Identify your requirements
It’s important that you know how you want your website to perform. Be sure to work closely with your client to set a clear vision of the scope of the site with a comprehensive “wish list” of functionality. Ask what they are budgeting for their new site along with their expectations of time to completion. Then work closely with your developer to have conversations as your design team creates the look and feel of the website. This will ensure that designs, functions, and code are all in alignment.
#2: Determine the platforms you need
Now that you have your vision for your website, it’s crucial to determine the best platforms to realize your clients’ desired functionality. In addition, if there are custom functions, you’ll need to determine how much time this will take. All of the right platforms and programming requires careful technical planning. This is where having a trusted partner to take this off your hands will help you.
#3: Plot your timeline
In order to have a website that meets your client’s function requirements, as well as your designers’ elegant vision, your overall project timeline must include milestones, bug testing plan, proper hosting to ensure it’s fast and powerful enough for the requirements, security, as well as long-term support and maintenance. It’s essential that you bring in a website development partner early enough in the process to ensure that you have each piece properly planned in your schedule and can meet your clients’ launch expectations.
#4: Take an honest look at your people and skills
Before you outsource complex websites, it’s essential to conduct an internal assessment so that you can ensure you keep your project moving forward on time and on budget, with no confusion among the participating parties. Ask the following questions:
- What is our current capacity with all of our projects?
- Do we have procedures and processes in place that allow us to interface with our web development partner?
- Who is the point person inside our agency that can communicate with our web development partner, our design team, and our client keeping everyone on target with their goals and expectations?
#5: Plan for long-term support and maintenance
Your website is launched, your designers’ vision is realized, and your client is overjoyed. Now what? For complex websites – for example, an ecommerce site – you must ensure that you have a website development partner that can handle the ongoing support and maintenance your clients’ site.
With increasing numbers of web hacks and security incidents, your clients need to have a guarantee that the websites your agency creates are secure and have the most up-to-date protection. In addition, you must be able to quickly make the updates and revisions that your client requests without overly burdening your team.
Meeting your back-end and front-end development requirements
Computer Courage works with agencies every day and knows what matters to your clients and your design team. We help to shore up your agency role as a strategic and innovative force for your clients’ growth. Your team can focus on what you do best – creative design and strategy – while we bring your web project to life!
In fact, we’ll actually help you impress your clients.
Our team continuously stays up to date with the latest web technology trends and technology and rises to even the most complex of development challenges (with a smile). Plus, we have innovative ideas to help you build unique and easy-to-manage website ideas to your clients.
Agencies turn to us because we allow them to plug into a team of experts, with a variety of skills. You get access to a range of talent including developers, UX experts, and project managers, as well as our well-honed processes for moving a website development project forward on time and on budget. We handle technology selection, project planning, bug fixing, security, code review, and more so that you can focus on your core services and your customers.
We also provide long-term maintenance and support to ensure all of your websites are secure with ongoing support for you or your client. Changes, updates, revisions, new features, and even training are all no problem!
Working with Computer Courage will not only alleviate your web development problems, we’ll actually save your agency time and money. You can improve the results you deliver to your clients.
We’ll work alongside you to fulfill your clients’ needs – either as a silent partner, (your clients don’t know we exist), or as a visible presence, helping you to field difficult technical questions at face-to-face meetings with your clients.
Ready to end your web-development headaches and meet all of your clients’ business goals? Call us today at 510-525-2226 or send a message.