Continued from last month’s article, back to build versus buy and what the best choice is. Businesses can buy a website technology that already exists or build from scratch to your specifications? Let’s take a closer look.
Buying Pros: Buying technology typically has a development team behind it for support, comes with some sort of support, documentation, services, a well known set of professionals in the world to assist you (if your regular “web person” decides to go AWOL) and typically has a large diverse team of users and developers. Also the work in many cases is largely done so the time-to-market is much quicker and the budget can be mostly spent on the customization of the technology to meet your needs. The costs are typically less for the technology purchase than to build from scratch. Software companies can offer it at a lower price than the cost of the total development since they are reselling their technology over and over to make their margins.
Buying Cons: The cons of this approach are typically small and around some small changes to your scope of the project or doing it “another way.” This is not always a bad thing since the reason the product works a particular way could be out of trial and error or the “Best Practice” for doing this process.
Building Pros: This approach offers a highly and very customized website, tailored to the exact needs of the business. In some cases this is inevitable, especially if the company is on the leading edge and nothing exists today for what they want to do, but expect to have a much larger development budget.
Building Cons: Typically a single company or person for development includes inherent culture (no outside diversity) and a high cost since the approach is to build from scratch and essentially re-inventing the wheel for even some common practices and functions, ie: login, storing user information, etc – something that is already pre-build when you purchase technology. While most developers take security seriously, again it is typically one group or person and the testing is in-house rather than a third party. One hundred developers thinking about security will always be better than one developer thinking about security… as the old saying goes, “two heads are better than one”.
So What’s the Bottom Line?
So in the end, each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. However the most cost effective and most secure route may always be the buy approach. Whether the purchase is commercial software or Open Source software (software that is provided sometimes with no cost and freely distributable) the investment in something that is built and produced by a professional team, the larger the better, will be the most cost effective for most small and medium businesses. This is the current trend and provides a much faster time-to-market with lower budget. And in some cases a blend of both approaches can be another option where the purchased technology is then customized to a businesses’ need. This approach is more common for the Open Source technology route and one that has a very large growing trend around the world.
Rob Gardner, founder of Santa Clarita Web & IT, has more than 16 years’ experience working with computer, web and IT technologies, including websites, security, regulatory compliance, and data loss prevention for Fortune 500 companies across the country.
For more information or If you’re a business owner/manager and have questions or need assistance with your website or IT services please call Rob Gardner at 661-799-9100 or email support@eSCV.com