We all know that designing and building Web sites can be an expensive undertaking. And it’s little wonder with the amount of planning, technical know-how and design expertise that’s needed to keep a site ahead of the pack.
It often makes sense to clients who have Web development skills in-house to outsource the overall architecture and design of the site to interactive agencies, and then manage the build themselves. That way they get a polished looking product that they can develop within their existing IT department budgets.
Recently our friends at Solar Depot contracted us to do just that. We developed a series of Dreamweaver templates, using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and fully-functioning PHP- and JavaScript-driven menus. They then took these and built out the rest of the site. The result? Take a look for yourself. Below you’ll find a link to the original templates (these will of course have limited functionality – they’re just templates after all!), and then a link to the current site. There’s no doubt some compromise has to be made when developing a site in-house. The question is whether this is a compromise you are willing to make. 