Generally, an Outsourcing Partner is a long term commitment. As such, it is important to choose a good partner. It is generally very tiring to keep changing partners for different projects as you have to get used to each others’ working style and expectations all over again.

So generally, what do we need to look for in an outsource partnership? Well, after doing some research around a few sites, we came to the following checklist:

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199Web was started with a vision of helping new start-ups which did not have much capital to invest on a simple website. As the year progresses, it seems that we started to handle more complicated projects like Content Management Systems (CMS), Ecommerce and Database Driven Applications.

Recently, there seems to be a trend for companies to outsource their web design work to us. They may be printers, graphic designers, event mangement companies or even accounting firms…. most of them will have the need to design a web pages for their clients every now and then… do they turn down the clients’ request… alternatively, they chose to look for us…

Honestly, we feel that it is a great WIN-WIN business decision!

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Most of my customers are not familiar with the difference between the concept of maintenance, hosting and change requests. Hosting refers to the storing of the application on a server.

Maintenance refers to the corrective action taken should unexpected events cause the application to fail. It is like insurance in the commercial world. It ensures that some one is there to service your application should it, as the saying goes, kick the bucket.

Change requests on the other hand refers to feature enhancement of the application. In today’s competitive business landscape, it is natural to issue continuous change requests and upgrades to ensure that your web application is effective.

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Most of the time, our customers are confused about the kind of website they need. Internet and web technologies has progressed at such a very rapid and bewildering pace that it can get really confusing. There are many, many, many ways to use the web. Thankfully, based on our experience 90% of our clients, can be satisfied with a set of standard solutions.

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As explained in the prior article on “Secret of Creating Beautiful Database Driven Websites”, the development of a Database Driven Site is split into 2 segments:

• Construction of a full static front end prototype (Web Designer)
• Implementing the necessary codes to fulfil the functionality (Software Developer)

Each segment of the project is handled by different personals.

This ensures that design decisions are made based solely on its aesthetic merit and will not be baised towards easier implementation by our developers.

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For the sake of all the other non-IT geeks around, I shall explain a little on what is a Database Driven Website. A lot of websites around in our world are mainly static. This means that the content does not change. However, some websites require their content to be updated constantly. These websites can be selling items online and has a constant need to add/remove items.

Such websites are database driven. This means… that all the products and the relevant information are stored neatly in a database (works on the same principle as an excel sheet). When a particular page is rendered, the information is retrieved from the database and rendered neatly in to a template kind of page before presenting to the customer.
So what is the secret?

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Just yesterday, someone called me and asked if it was really true that we were giving our clients a free mockup with no strings attached. I said a definite YES. I was met with an incredulous expression of surprise, as our prospective customer asked how that could be possible in a country like Singapore (known to be kiasu)….

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199Web seeks to offer professional design at affordable prices. Like it or not, the internet is becoming pervasive in our modern society. Corporate websites are becoming as standard and commonplace as namecards.

Realising that a large proportion of Singapore companies still lack a web presence. 199Web is set up to address this concern.

“80% of returns are centered around 20% of activity”

As in all things, 80% of a company’s Return of Investments (ROI) are generally centered around 20% of their activities. This is also applicable when you are working on your company websites.

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In an effort to streamline our operations to provide huge cost savings to our customers, 199Web works on the basis of a ticketing system. Basically, we advocate support requests to be sent directly to us via email to support@199web.com.sg.

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