Ted Goldsmith, AZINET Business Internet Solutions
As use of the Internet increases it has become increasingly important for companies to have a good company web site for access by prospective employees, customers and suppliers. Many companies are tempted to produce their web site in-house. After all, many companies have a graphic arts/publication/documentation department and also have a computer/software/MIS department and it is certainly true that these departments together could produce a web site. Here are some of the reasons a company might want to hire an outside web site developer to supplement their in-house capabilities.
First, producing an effective, competitive web site requires a unique and intimate combination of publication capability and computer skills. In most companies there is relatively little interaction between the computer department and the publications department and the temptation is to assign the site task to one department or the other. Web sites developed by computer departments tend to be heavy on "flash" and effects but light on content. In a worst case these sites remind me of the phrase "...like a tale told by an idiot, all full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"!
Web sites developed by publications departments are better on content but tend to be unsuccessful because of technical reasons. Publications people tend to not understand the computer aspects especially the on-line communications and programming language issues. Such sites tend to be "flat" and don't take advantage of the unique properties of the Internet medium.
Second, effective, competitive, web site development requires new skills and mastery of new technology which is almost certainly not present in either company department. We can testify from direct personal experience that it takes a tremendous amount of effort to develop and maintain the specialized knowledge associated with this new, highly technical, and rapidly growing communications medium. We work with the Internet every day and continue to be amazed at the rate at which things change and the number of tricks and techniques involved.
The Internet is really a qualitatively new medium with strange new properties when compared to print or broadcast media. You cannot just "map" print techniques onto the Internet to result in a competitive site.
If your company plans to develop a very large, continuously updated site you probably have no choice but to develop substantial in-house capability. You can save yourself a lot of pain and speed up the process by hiring an existing site development company to train your people.
If you just want a typical company web site it is probably not cost effective to develop it in-house. If you do go the in-house route, I would recommend training up personnel in the publications department vs the computer department. Once your people learn internet skills, be prepared to substantially increase their salaries to retain them.
If you decide to go the "out-of-house" route you will probably want your existing publications department to continue to do the things they are already trained to do such as developing graphic art, producing photographs, and collecting text material. It is much easier for the site developer to work from electronic media (word processor files) than hard copy.
If you plan to have an internal internet capability ("intranet") or if you want to provide internet access to existing company computer data, you will want to have your existing computer department highly involved. If you already have a company connection to the Internet, you may want your computer department to provide the host machine for your web site. On the other hand, having the web server internal to your company could introduce security problems and allow hackers to penetrate your company network. The web server could also load down your company network. If you do decide to have your own web server we recommend that it be hosted on its own machine and not share a machine with other company functions.