Ask HN: In house web dev (comprehensive) versus agency approach? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: In house web dev (comprehensive) versus agency approach?

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50 person startup here. Currently we cobble together our website (netfoundry.io) as best effort from a few of us. Now we are at 60+ customers and need it to be a business tool (part of our educational, demand-gen and demand-conversion (self-serve) toolbox).

We need it all including overall UX, UI design, dev, tech writing, graphics, SEO and ops. Therefore tempted to consider an agency (our team is focused on developing our product and supporting our customers - we can't be distracted by the website).

On the other hand, communicating our product requires skilled technical writers, and likely domain expertise in open source, secure networking, DevSecOps and XaaS. The types of folks we may be better off adding to our team directly.

All that said, we don't have much experience with this. Thoughts from those who are more expert? We could of course go with a hybrid model as well - hoping to learn from what you have learned, while recognizing there is a YMMV component to this.

Use an agency to create the marketing site, let them worry about design, config, SEO etc. Obviously your company & team would be setting the requirements, needs, design goals etc, but hire an agency to deal with building that out.

My 2 cents, use wordpress, hire an agency and have them set it up so your team can add the technical articles, posts etc as needed but get the crux of it done using an outside resources that specialize in doing that kind of work.

Most good agencies also have copy writers and some even have tech writers as well. You can setup topics, give them specific goals for each article to write that then you just wordsmith, but the initial time consuming part is done for you. There are agencies that specialize in almost every industry, just look for one. And if not this is where your team can step in to help craft the articles/content themselves but not have to worry about the design & dev of the site.

Just one thing to watch-out for when using an agency's WordPress (I have been burnt by this before).

Keep an eye on the implementation, some agencies will just glue together 30 plugins and tweak the themes they have using WYSIWYG kind of tools.

This could result to super bloated results, with each page loading 20Mb of useless assets and doing 100+ useless SQL queries to render what should have been a simple landing page.

I got assigned to fix that mess, and telling upper-management that the agency they chose basically fucked-them-over was not an easy discussion.

I totally agree, you still have to be diligent, and set ground rules on what is acceptable and not. I've sadly had to fix the same issues and have those same discussions.

I should probably have said that, but part of outsourcing is setting those types of ground rules and holding the agency to them. Good agencies generally don't have an issue with this, it is the lowest cost ones or the "friends, cousins, kid" type are where you almost always get the bad result.

Hey can you elaborate a bit on this? What are the common mistakes that agencies make or what are some bad WP coding practices?

The examples I saw came mostly from agencies shoving as many WordPress plugins as possible and then tweaking them instead of doing some (or any) basic PHP/HTML/JS.

This wasn't even about WP coding practices, since there wasn't much coding done by the agency at all. This is usually a sign that they have more "webmasters" than "web-developers".

Plugins/Themes are not fundamentally a bad thing, but sometimes it feels like they're fitting a circle into a square.

The worst offender I saw was a WP landing page doing 100+ SQL queries to display a basic home-page.

What were these queries doing? Getting the color of the header. Then the color of the logo. And then the size of the carrousel, etc.. etc...

I'm not sure what a non-technical person can do to keep things sane. However, the minimum is to have a short feedback cycle where you try the website and see if it feels sluggish. Open the browser console and see how many Megabits its downloading. Run it through LightHouse [0] and see how it scores.

[0] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Wordpress is horrible to develop for. Look at CraftCMS, a proper CMS architected and built as a CMS. It’ll also help you separate the Wordpress plug-in kiddies from people who actually build websites.

I’ve been building websites for a long time and Wordpress is the most horrible codebase I’ve encountered. I’ll never touch it again. 1-click install to hell.

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