The webmaster is dead.
Back in the day (circa late 90s early 2000s), a single webmaster could be knowledgeable enough to manage a company's entire web presence. A little server knowledge, some PHP, lots of HTML/CSS and a little Photoshop to bring it all home. But things change, industries evolve, and the web in particular is a fast moving industry.
Nowadays, to build a cutting-edge website, store, or application it takes an experienced team of professionals, each focusing on one particular aspect of the project build. A typical web project will require an experienced: project manager, designer, front-end developer, and an engineer. For an advanced project you will also want to add a UX and Javascript specialist to your team.
Below are 6 reasons why you should hire a digital web agency instead of trying to build an internal web team for your company:
1. Unless your company is a huge global e-commerce brand or sells Software as a Service, an internal webnteam is overkill. As already stated, you can't just hire one person and expect to build and grow a professional brand online anymore. Anyone can buy a template off of Theme Forest and change a few colors, but if you want to create a professional looking site to stay ahead of your competition, you need to have a fully qualified team. Even if you have a very bare bones team of three people, that is still 480 hours of work per month that you have to fill to keep your employees productive. On top of that you need to make sure the workload is properly distributed across all 3 skill sets.
2. Freelancers just don't cut it. If you do not hire your team and instead try to manage a band of freelancers as your team, it is likely not going to end well. Finding 3 qualified freelances with availability, a good work ethic, and all of the skills needed for your project is going to be a challenge. Additionally there will be a lot of management time involved keeping everyone on task and under budget. Freelancers are used to filling specialized roles of a larger team, not collaborating with other freelancers to brainstorm and build a project.
3. Hiring and growing an experienced web team is difficult and expensive. Finding and hiring qualified talent is always difficult, but web talent in particular is becoming more competitive (and expensive) than ever. Because a web team collaborates so closely with one another it is important to make sure that personalities don't clash and that the team members can work well with one another. You must also ensure that the team you create is experienced and possess all of the skills that you will need to manage and grow your website or store.
4. You need to understand the inner workings of your technology platform in order to hire a talented team. Finding a talented web designer that is able to properly capture your brand identity online is difficult enough, but trying to piece together a dedicated team of developers with enough expertise to build and manage your web platform is a daunting task. Simply reviewing past work history will not provide you with enough information to determine if a new hire has the skill set required to accomplish custom tasks required for your project. If you hire a development team that is too junior you will be paying a lot of overhead in training and skill development, but if you go too advanced you will be paying for some very expensive salaries.
5. Over time, internal teams will stagnate and become inefficient. Designers and developers get bored working on the same project over and over with little to no variation. At a company, as opposed to an agency, employees will often have big periods of downtime and as a will feel the need to make up work in order to look productive and validate their position with the company. On the contrary an agency can easily scale the resources dedicated to your project to meet your needs for each month. This allows you to scale back your web costs when you are slow and ramp up for the busy season, without having to fire and re-hire internal resources.
6. Web technology is ever changing. Internal teams do not get as much exposure to the new and always advancing web technologies because they are always stuck working within the confines of the same project everyday, often on an outdated technology stack. Employees will make upgrades to the existing platform, but they never get to start from scratch and re-imagine how their system could work. This prevents them from thinking outside of the box and results in the stagnation and monotony of your technology, your website, and in the end, your brand.
Small digital agencies are experienced, cost effective, and scale to meet your company's exact needs.
Small digital agencies are fast paced, well-oiled machines. Unlike their larger counterparts, their prices are much more reasonable, and they are filled with very talented resources since they generally have less junior resources than a larger agency. Agency employees are used to troubleshooting issues across a multitude of projects and platforms and as a result have more experience to pull from when confronting new problems. Agency employees are also experienced working on tasks quickly and efficiently in order to maximize the amount of work they can get done every day. Because of the ever changing projects that they work on, agency employees are trained to keep an open mind and re-imagine every project in a new way.
In the end a small agency is always going to have an advantage over an internal team. An agency will bring fresh eyes and a wealth of knowledge to your project, pushing your brand to new heights and evolving your web presence past that of your competition. If you are interested in learning more about how working with a small digital agency can save you time and money, contact us today!
