Who actually does the work on my website?
Who actually does the work on my website?
If you're gathering quotes for a website at the moment, two questions worth adding to the list: Who will I be speaking to while this is being built? What happens when I want a word changed six months after it goes live?
Ask, and a web company should be able to tell you in one sentence. Some build everything themselves, some pass the work to freelancers or to a team abroad, and some do a mix depending on the job. None of those is automatically wrong, but you are entitled to know which one you are buying before you pay a deposit.
Why does it matter who does the work?
It matters for two practical reasons, and neither is about skill. The first is how quickly you get an answer. If the person you email is not the person doing the build, every question you ask joins a queue and comes back a day or two later, slightly altered in the handover. Small jobs that would take ten minutes take a fortnight. The second is what happens afterwards. A site built by someone you have never spoken to, in a system nobody explained to you, is harder to pick up when you want a change in a year's time.
Is outsourcing a problem?
Not in itself. Plenty of good work is done by freelancers and by teams outside the UK, and a small company that brings in a specialist for one part of a build, a complicated Shopify integration or the photography, is doing the sensible thing. The complaint that keeps appearing in public is not that work was outsourced. It is that it was outsourced quietly, after a pitch that implied otherwise, and the client worked it out when the replies started arriving at three in the morning.
What should I ask before I pay a deposit?
Three questions cover it. Who will be building this, and will I speak to them at any point. Who do I contact when something breaks, and what is the normal reply time. If you are away or busy, who picks it up. The answers matter less than the fact that they come straight back; a company that has to go away and think about it has told you something.
What we've seen in practice
The businesses who come to us unhappy with a previous supplier rarely complain about the standard of the work. They complain about silence. Weeks without an answer, a project that stalled at ninety per cent, an invoice arriving with nothing attached to it. In nearly all of those cases the client could not name the person who had built their site. They had a company name, and an email address that went to a shared inbox, and no idea who was at the other end of it. Where a client can name the person doing the work, those problems tend not to arise, because there is nobody to hide behind.
The other pattern is handover. Sites built by a team the client never met tend to arrive with nothing written down. No note of where the hosting sits, which plugins are doing what, or why a page was built the way it was. That is recoverable, but it costs the next person a day's work, and the client pays for that day.
OptyDigitals tells you who is doing the work, and who you will be speaking to while it is being done, before any money changes hands.
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