On 06:42:59 20 May 2007 JonathanZack wrote:

Hi Lopa,

I am no expert in anything.....I am though going through similar options myself at present...I have thus asked for a quote from a Pakistani contact who runs a team of E-Commerce solution designers...he is quoting me 1/5 prices of UK.....but I question distance and thus my personal control over my business vision

I think re: Biz Don't think I am going to invest big.......invest your time and energies to find the most efficient solution to expediating your vision.....you may be very suprised to find Off the Shelf solutions that you can tailor to your business model at "Invest Wisely and relatively minimally costs! Go to Google and type in your key product definition words and software and off the shelf etc and I hope you are as excited and suprised I am.........Of course time will only tell.....

 Good morning

We are a UK based company with offices in London and Dagenham where we have admin, sales and consultancy staff.  Our main technical centre is a 22,000 sq ft office in Calcutta, India.  By doing this we offer the benefits of a local presence (with same time, language, culture etc) combined with the very low cost of the Indian sub continent.  We also have a web based project control system that gives clients a real time view over project control.  If this is of interest please contact me:

Paul Boyes

Business Development Manager

Gurg Consulting Ltd

Office 020 8343 4888

Mobile 07983 541006

eMail paul@gurgconsulting.com

www.gurgconsulting.com

Best Wishes

Jonathan Zack

On 17:30:20 19 May 2007 LopaPatel wrote:

On 12:23:30 17 May 2007 AndrewMogridge wrote:

I'm looking to invest heavily in a new ecommerce website and am prepared to travel to India to find a design company that's really good.

I'd like a £40k website but only have a budget of £10k.

Any thoughts?

Hi Paul

Why India? I'm not sure your budget warrants going there, when for £10K you could buy something ready-made from here and have it customised to suit  your purposes. I have worked with several Indian programmers, and like you, it has been a mixed experience. It takes 10x longer and there is a lot of mis-understanding even with basics like date formats, weights, measurements and VAT (not sure what you are selling?). They do finish the job and bring it in within the budget, but there is high STAFF TURNOVER so the people who will work on your project will have moved on by the time you come to wanting amendments...so you'll be starting from scratch each time. I had a manual written for a lot of my custom programming, but find I still had to update a lot of it myself.

For ecommerce, I would strongly suggest buying a ready-made package like Cactushop (http://www.cactushop.com) or Evolve (http://www.lynxinternet.com). Both offer a hosted solution to get you going or you can buy their software and pay them to customise it for you. Both can deliver within your £10K and I'm not on the payroll of either company, I just bought both pieces of software.!

That's my tuppence worth.

Regards
Lopa Patel (Mrs)

PS. I am Indian myself, so I have absolutely nothing against Indian Programmers!!!

Travelling won't necessarily help you find the right supplier. Outsourced development depends on being able to manage the developer from afar and across time zones.

Whilst India (and many other countries) are generally cheaper than the UK, once you factor in your own management time, and lost revenues due to the extra time the work takes you may not be much better off.

From recent experience I'd suggest you get recommendations of suppliers from your colleagues and peers in the UK, check out  references, then try them out on a smaller project to see how you work together before going 'all in' with a site your business depends on.

You may do well to look to the US at the moment where you can get some excellent work done at good rates with the current weak dollar. I've used outsourced developers in the US, Philipines, Sweden and Greece in the last few weeks and the US work was by  far the most cost-effective even though the initial quote was a bit higher.

Hi Steve

Thanks for the sound advice. I've worked with American creative people in the past and found them excellent, so with the wek dollar at the moment it's definately work considering.

Regards

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

If you are still interested and require further help <however, I do see a lot of valuable help has already been posted on here> I can be of assistance and am probably exactly what you are looking for.

I work for a company called Outscope.  We have a UK based operation in Bath with an offshore development suite based in Sri Lanka.  We have firm experience creating recognised, high ranking e-commerce sites (www.duoboots.com just one example).

I think the beauty of what we can do for you is to give you the sub-asia tropic costs that you are after but with a UK contact and account manger, who can really invest the time and understand your requirements and passing this over to our development team.

Please contact me for more information on how we can help you.

Thanks

David McLean
e: david@outscope.com t: 01225469979

On 12:23:30 17 May 2007 AndrewMogridge wrote:

I'm looking to invest heavily in a new ecommerce website and am prepared to travel to India to find a design company that's really good.

I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who knows of an Indian Web Design company that know their stuff. I'm not after a one man band but a proper operation with a portolio of blue chip clients.

I'd like a £40k website but only have a budget of £10k.

I've had mixed experiences when sourcing overseas skills through elance.com and guru.com so I'm hoping that making the effort to go to India with a comprehensive brief would be a good way to getting what I'm after.

Any thoughts?