Each person has 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Well, I do anyways, and if you know of a way to increase that, please let me know - I’ll pawn you my left kidney. Anyhow. I’d like to talk about ways to outsource and to leverage other people’s resources as much as you can in order to make your projects go faster and smoother.

The newest web design contract I have is a broad one that involves a custom-designed CMS (Content Management System) as well as Flash design, multiple file upload systems, as well as Microsoft Live Maps integration.

As I am the project manager, I am in charge of commanding over the whole project and determining who does what and what components to buy. Here’s how the duties got split up between people and purchased software packages.

1. The Design & Concept - The visuals of this website is arguably one of the most important aspects, hence I am in charge of it directly. After all, I’m the one who’s been producing newspaper ad designs and flyer designs for this client over the last 4 months. I have created the Photoshop files that have all the design elements and layers.
2. Flash Design - Flash has been sub-contracted out to my friend Steven Stark, who owns Vancouver Online Media. He did another flash project with me a while ago.
3. Programming of the CMS - That’s my job. Custom PHP programming is one of the things I do well. I also need to take some SEO into consideration. While SEO is not a huge part of this website, I like to make enough effort on it anyways just for the hell of it.
4. Photo Upload - JumpLoader has been selected as the Java App of choice to upload multiple images at once for the content. I definitely was not going to program a whole new multiple-photo upload application using PHP or whatever that wouldn’t even be as good as this JumpLoader gadget. I do have a clear distinction of what stuff I consider to be best custom-programmed and what stuff should be purchased. I personally do not use off-the-shelf CMS’s like Joomla or Mambo - I just use these type of applets and other scripts and fit them into my code to make it all work.
   
5. Photo Cropping - I need another applet for photo cropping - preferrably in Java. Anybody know of anything? I haven’t found much for this yet…
6. HTML/CSS - This is my job once again. This part involves laying out all the Flash pieces, and other elements in order to display the finished product.

So this project has a good distribution between myself, Steven, and other 3rd party applets already developed by other people. This is the best way I found to make a project go smooth and quick, and also utilize the skillsets of other people to my advantage.

This type of sub-contracting as well as applet utilization may sound like obvious points to other web developers out there, but I hope this helps some newbies that are also out there as well. Also, similar concepts can be applied to other emerging businesses. I know it’s hard at first to sub-contract out to other people because you think about the revenue you’re losing, but in the long run this will make things go smoother for you!

By the way, my new company in Vancouver/Costa Rica that handles Design & Marketing is Synchronous Design & Marketing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Business Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.