If your client has something in mind that can’t easily be fit into one of these packages your left with not many options. Over the past month I have had two people come to me with osCommerce sites that want mandatory registration taken out. Knowing how terrible osCommerce is, I tell them I will charge them an hourly rate to do it, at which they are extremely unhappy. No one likes hourly rates. One of these guys paid £5,500 for his off the shelf osCommerce site with a disgraceful degraded jpeg ’skin’ forced over the top of the bloated and ugly code. Another company I was in contact a while ago paid £8,000 for an similarly disgraceful degraded jpeg design botched into osCommerce and are paying £150 a month for hosting.

The way these open source apps are being used in conjunction with really low quality web development companies in India is killing off the web development companies over here that actually give a and try to give their clients high end products that will actually work for them.

I think there really does need to be some sort of body to oversee web development companies to make sure that both quality developers and clients are informed and looked after. I hear about companies that get swindled by web development companies on a regular basis. Currently I am working with a guy who has spent over £60,000 on web development but has never received a working site or anything that comes close to working.

The fact remains that offshoring you can get 5 programmers for the price of one in the UK.

With the right management infrastructure and European representation / standards / controls there is no reason why companies cannot do a good job…

I would agree that the for really high end stuff you would not outsource, but give it a few years and that will change.

Japanese motorbikes were ridiculed when they were first imported to the UK… I.T. is no different in that context.