“I make everything in-house!”

As the owner of a web-design business, hearing this exclamation from competitors puts a smile on my face. As a web design instructor, however, I admonish my students for the same declaration.

I don’t know why so many web designers feel the need to try to make everything themselves. Maybe it’s the innate creativity flowing through their veins, or the fact that web design is a very artistic enterprise. Whatever the case, the philosophy that everything on a website should be proprietary costs designers time and money.

The reason is simple: reinventing the wheel—creating your own solution to a design problem instead of purchasing an already-made solution—does not give you the return on investment that you’d see by using a third party’s solution. This is true for every business, but especially so for web designers.

Here’s a simple case to illustrate this point. Let’s say you have a client that is going to pay you $2000.00 to design an e-commerce website with an online catalogue, a shopping cart and a checkout mechanism. You could spend your own time to make this portion of the site, or you could purchase an off-the-shelf component.

Now imagine you find the component you need for $500.00. Is it worth it to buy the product rather than make it yourself? Well, now let’s say it would take you 20 hours to make the component yourself. If you do the math, you’re making $25.00 per hour to create the component you could simply buy for the $500.00. If you save yourself the 20 hours to work on or find another project, you could end up generating much more income in the long run through the volume of projects you’re able to complete.

This type of scenario is often used by many of the larger technology corporations. In his book, Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton—a designer for Microsoft Corporation—points out that of all of the applications sold by Adobe, only two were created in-house. ONLY TWO!!! Aside from Illustrator and Acrobat, every other application Adobe puts its name on was created by another company and then bought by Adobe.

Personally speaking, I take the same approach when I develop sites. For example, I do much of my work with the open-source CMS, Joomla. The wonderful thing about Joomla is not that the main component is free or powerful, but that so many extensions have been written for this primary system that functionality and modification is made super-simple. With just a few small tweaks of already existing components, I can have an online gallery or an online catalogue (or both). If I spent the time making from scratch what others have already created, I’d end up losing in the long run.

So as has been suggested before, use third-party components whenever possible to offset the time it would otherwise take you to make them. Spend the time you saved getting or finishing another project.