Web Design Business Models – Time for a Poll

Recently, I have been pondering what the best business model is for web-design. I have been discussing this with some of my associates here in Vancouver and most would agree that “it depends” is the only good answer. But I am really wondering what motivates certain companies to choose say an outsourced hourly one-man band vs a fixed contract supplier out of India vs going down the DIY path of learning a content management system. These three models are the most prevalent and each has obvious benefits and challenges (I have used all three so I know all too well). But it’s the decision-making process that is integral to the future of this entire industry and a question that I am most interested in discussing with others.

So, to answer this question, I wanted to run a poll to accompany this blog. I began by uninstalled the core Joomla 1.5 poll component and module and replaced it with a fresh extension. Why settle for the default core extension when a better free version is out there…right?

I looked at pollXT briefly and was about to install it when I noticed that I would need to run my Joomla site in Legacy Mode. Reports show that Legacy Mode has only a minimal impact on site performance, speed, memory, and so on. But given that my site is already a bit heavy, I want to avoid any further drag so I discarded pollXT and moved on to my second choice.

Next in line was Apoll. I liked that this is another intuitive and easy to configure extension. Some basic drag and drop makes making and managing polls a tad easier. I also liked the added ability to format the css of the results display. I disabled the pie chart for now because it takes a few more results to actually look good (I may enable it later). I also had to disable my SEF URL generator, Artio JoomSEF, for this component as it was causing some nasty 404 errors when displaying the poll results.

So, respond to the poll and feel free to plug your own company in the comments area below if you think you’ve got the web design business model that satisfies the needs of the many.