The trend of outsourcing web design services to countries such as India is not new. The IT outsourcing trend started building during the Internet boom of the 1990s and has not let up.  However, the volume of stories of failed offshore efforts is also growing. It is in this context that many US companies debate whether hiring website designers in India is the right choice or whether they should stay closer to home.  In this article we strive to lay out some basics on web design and the pros and cons of selecting and Indian design firm.

First, let’s come to a clear definition of ‘web design’.  In the early days of the Internet, web programming and web design were synonymous. It used to take hundreds of lines of code to create a background and a couple of text boxes and get text to align correctly.

As the web progressed, design and program have been disaggregated into different skill sets or competencies.  Web programming is typically referred to as the back end coding that drives the functionality of a website.  Web design defines a more creative set of activities that includes navigability, look and feel, and branding.

Web design, in this respect, has become even more important as we are now firmly in the age of the second generation of web users who are sophisticated in their ability to judge a site at a glance. According to the results of a recent Comscore survey, the average length of time taken by an online visitor to judge a website and then decide to either stay or click away is just .25 seconds. That’s less than half a second during which the painstakingly created elements of web programming and content do not even come into the picture. The decision is made holistically by the overall impression created by the graphic design of the website itself.

As you would expect the graphic aspects of web design provide for mixed results almost anywhere you go. Selecting a US web designer, for instance, is no guarantee that you will get graphic design that is any better than anything produced by an Indian designer.

However, one can argue that design skills are more highly variable in India.  The large volumes of Indian graduates each year is well documented however the variability of skills is not as well known.  The famous Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT), (commonly sited as more difficult to get into than Harvard) only graduates a few thousand technical students each year.  At the same time, tens of thousands graduate from schools with mixed records of preparing students.  Large Indian Technology firms have set up massive internal training programs to bring new hires up to speed.  However, small & midsized web design firms have fewer resources to expend on training and thus quality can vary.

The second contributor to variability is market and domain knowledge.  Living in and participating in the local market can give a local designer a baseline market knowledge that the average Indian designer may not have. This is not to say that an Indian designers focused on your market may not have equal or greater insight than a local designer, but that you must take more care in the selection decision due to this variability.

With all this additional variability in quality, one may ask why do companies continue to send web design work to India.  The answer is cost.  The salary of the average web designer in India can be one fifth to one tenth of a US designer.  All this cost savings does not fully flow to pricing (there are some higher management costs when doing work offshore), but it is not uncommon for Indian design companies to price at 1/3 to 1/4 of US firms.

Bottom line, there is a great tradition of web design and programming in India.  You can get great work for a fraction of the cost, but this requires additional care in selecting and managing your provider.