Can we compete with offshore products?

The Dunham Group is professional and relational. We are honest and fair. We are about service with a fair compensation. Above all….we are about producing product that meets every single one of your stated needs. It's our guarantee.

Obviously the answer is no. Of course there are back and forth arguments about whether or not we should buy local or buy offshore. It’s very easy to fall into buying off-shore products because they are far less expensive. Of course one wonders if this isn’t simply a perpetuation of the “colonial” attitude which most likely was responsible for the division of developing and developed nations. We take their raw resources and pay them with beads or trinkets.

That argument aside, it would seem that the issue of competition with off-shore firms who offer web development or software development is far deeper.

A few years back, we received a call from one of our clients who was frantic. They had received a “cease and desist” order from a lawyer who claimed that they had virtually copied his client’s website. We were the authors and developers of our client’s website. We were rather shocked, as we know that our design was original and we had even written much of the text in our offices. Upon further examination, we found that the competitor’s website had taken the text from our site and copied it word for word. The HR section was an exception. We checked the web and found that the HR section was a copy of another firm in Great Britain. The site we had constructed was 2 years old and the competitor’s site as 6 months old. Obviously – we had not copied anything and they had stolen from us!

We examined the copied site further and found glaring spelling errors throughout the site. Even the firm’s address was misspelled. Of course it was an off-shore web developer that had done this for a bargain basement price and the result was an absolutely un-usable website. It was now our lawyer’s turn to tell them to remove the site from the web.

That’s just one of many horror stories. We cannot compete in the area of price. We simply do not pay our staff 2 to 3 dollars per hour. No one would expect that. Our staff consists of Professional Software engineers, Graduates in Fine and Applied Arts, and business degree grads. They are smart, perceptive and well-worth their wages – just like all of us.

When one engages a firm like the Dunham Group, they know that they have the services of professionals and those services will reap benefits. Our sites are not constructed as if they were business cards out on the web hope beyond hope to produce results. In fact every bit of our marketing, our programming is carefully thought out in order to make certain that what we do is of service to you. As far as we are concerned – your website is our website. And we have no intention of failing!

There are some who won’t be convinced and who will be tempted by the bargain. We would estimate that virtually 100% of those sites or web projects will ultimately not produce.

The Dunham Group is professional and relational. We are honest and fair. We are about service with a fair compensation. Above all….we are about producing product that meets every single one of your stated needs. It’s our guarantee.