No! We do our design, development, and marketing in house

Our clients often ask us if we could reduce our prices by outsourcing our development to a lower-cost country. In our experience, outsourced web development is primarily appropriate for someone more concerned with a low-cost project than with a cost-effective one. Clients who are thinking of outsourcing quote low prices and fast turnaround times — the clients who actually do it often come back with horror stories of missed deadlines, cost overruns, and buggy, unusable sites.

There are plenty of reliable outsourcing companies out there. Unfortunately, it’s easy to budget more money into sales and marketing and less into development and quality, so the average outsourcing pitch is likely to come from a less established company.

With a difference of timezones and cultures, miscommunications due to outsourcing can grow fast. If an issue requires back-and-forth emails to resolve, something that should take minutes can take some companies days: an email sent at the beginning of the day in the US will arrive after office hours in India; the response will arrive in the middle of the night.

At Blue Fountain Media, we avoid these issues: our design, marketing, and accounts teams are all based in New York, so clients can reach us. And our development team in Ukraine works hard and works late; they’re often in the office past 3 PM Eastern (10 PM local time!), so they’re able to resolve issues during normal business hours.

It’s one thing to say there’s “A Team,” and another entirely to say who will be doing what, and why they’re capable. Our development team consists entirely of people with undegraduate and masters’ degrees in mathematics and computer science. Their experience:

• Our PHP/MySQL developers average five years of experience. Dmitry, Max, Eugeny, Alexey, Andrey, Roman, and Ilya are ready to tackle new projects.
• Our ASP.NET/MSSQL developers average six years of experience. Sergey and Alexander have built some great websites, and they’re ready for more!
• The front-end developers average four years of experience, in Photoshop, Flash, HTML, CSS, and Adobe Illustrator. Alex K., Sergey K., Sergey M., Alex S., Andrey, Alexander D., Dmitry, Andrey, and Igor know how to make a great-looking site.
• The project management and QA team has an average of four years of experience just in those fields, as well as technical expertise relevant to the projects they manage. Roman S., Roman K, Alex, Denis, Dmitry, and Sergey are all adept at managing teams.

Not another faceless outsourcing firm.

Our founder and creative director, Gabriel spent a few weeks with the team in Ukraine recently. Here are some photos:

Tags: FAQ, outsourcing, ukraine