Observation about Outsourcing Companies

[DXL]

I'd say that at least 90% of the overseas companies that email me every day offering design services, have a portfolio of nothing but templated sites. If I wanted my clients to have templated sites, I'd buy the templates and slap them together myself.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[edacsac]

I've seen that as well. I have a site offering web design services, and yet they want to sell me a web site? And yes, the sites are poor and very common.

From time to time, I get worried about overseas competition. But lately I'm starting to find customers who understand the value of personalized branding and they're happy to pay for a unique design. It doesn't take much effort to overcome the the outsourced quality. It seems the over exuberance of cheap design has flooded the market with poo-poo that people are getting tired of.

[newviewit]

Originally I was looking into the low cost outsourcing area but decided against it after trying out around 50+ designers/programmers. Designers were ok but for the life of me I couldn't find any suitable programmers that didn't need their hand held the whole way through. It is extremely difficult to find designers/programmers that are on the same level as in the west over here.

[edited by: jatar_k at 1:09 pm (utc) on May 28, 2008]

[agbenny]

There are several companies like us, never encourage to buy ready made templates, if the plan for a successful business with uniqueness everywhere. In fact we do not offer design template customization alone as a separate job. Even for opensource based CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal), we convenience the customers to unique templates for them.
The difficult for every design firm is justifying why the customer should go for a custom design.

Most of the offshore companies are getting projects from a middle man companies. As a cost cutting strategy, and to simplify the design cycle they show some templates to their customers, convenience them without mentioning the cost and benefits of custom design and send the work to offshore designers. I believe for this reasons, any of the designers you had seen might have templates in their portfolio. But now this issue is global, not only with the outsourcing firms.

[Tugeza]

I wonder what countries you were turning to - I am from Belarus (Eastern Europe) and there dozen of smart designers and talented programmers I work with. So may be it is a matter of the off-shore country and education level...