Top 5 Reasons You Should Outsource Development, Maintenance And Support To Simple Information
5) Focus on your business
Your organization requires your focus, 100%. Hiring in-house workers to support your website means that you are now, in effect, a "web development shop." Most likely, this means resources dedicated to extra staff and the management of that staff; resources that could be used elsewhere. Furthermore, the demands of I.T. vary greatly. What will you do with the in-house staff when the project is completed? Or the platform changes and an entirely new set of skills are needed?
Outsourcing your Drupal Maintenance and Support allows you to focus on your core business. After all, do you really want to be in the web development market space?
4) Response Time
We've found that in-house support staff is quickly burdened with support from many areas of the organization.
And requests are put on a general 'to do' list. If you have a lot of power in your company, your request may get priority; otherwise, it may get ignored or delayed.
For us, you are our client, and as such, all requests are reviewed immediately. We have a special help desk system to insure that your requests are reviewed and given the highest priority. Our team leaders and project managers review requests several times a day.
3) Quality
Even the best developers can make mistakes. To find mistakes before they go live it takes an entire team of professionals that perform quality testing on the code and/or configuration. This ares may be larger than you think. For example, there is behavioral testing that simulatesthe behaviorof users. This is done with tools like "Behat" that can simulate the behavior of hundreds of users on the site simultaneously. There is also unit testing that can test segments of code before it's implemented. And this is just a scratch on the QA surface.
Whats more, because we have worked with content management systems like Drupal and WordPress for more than a decade, we can evaluate our team members and understand exactly what their capabilities are.
2) Tools
The cost of tools to build and maintain your site can be very expensive and take a long time to use correctly. We can justify the cost because we use the tools on many different websites.For example, we have tools to check the performance of your server and website, create test sites and clones of your live site, do daily backups and more.
Security is also critical and often requires special tools. Our tools warn us when there's important security updates available, and if a site is down orif a site is under attack, etc. Other tools automatically install updates for us and tell us when an update has failed.
Other tools include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing)tools that help us evaluate your site versus your competitors. We use these tools to optimize your content, keywords, and more; thereby, saving you thousands on expenses like Google AdWords.
1) Cost (the big one)
I.T. professionals are expensive. Also, websites have advanced to a point where supporting and developingthem requires a team. That is, new features development, design upgrades and improvements, performance monitoring and enhancements, security, and more are now covered by a team of experts; each one of them focusing their career on one of those areas.For most organizations, keeping such a team in-house is just simply too expensive. That's why they use us. We can provide expertise in all of these areas for less then the cost of a single in-house specialist. Not convinced?
Here are some actual numbers:
Cost of One Full time Professional (Drupal, Baltimore-Washington Area, actual costs incurred by one of our clients. ) | Project cost of site development and support for 5 years. These numbers are from an actual project. | |||
year 1 | 90,000 | year 1 | 79,376 | |
year 2 | 90,000 | year 2 | 34,801 | |
year 3 | 90,000 | year 3 | 29,625 | |
year 4 | 90,000 | year 4 | 21,478 | |
year 5 | 90,000 | year 5 (estimated) | 15,000 | |
Total | 450,000 | Total | 180,280 | |
*Above salary estimate does not include: Payroll taxes paid, Benefits paid, vacation time, nor sick time. | Project Details: Site upgrade and redesign, File Management system that organizes and tracks revisions of files including pdf, xml, word, powerpoint, and more. Email integration with Microsoft. Custom Forms. Member's management system including groups. Custom views and reports. Server Optimization for Drupal, Site Optimization for performance. Maintenance and Support. |