What is an America First Website Designer?
An America First Website designer is a team of web developers that designs and develops with the idea of American businesses being valued above foreign resources. At X8 Web Design, we do not employ foreign or offshore teams to develop our sites. All of our websites are built here in the United States, allowing you to have peace of mind, knowing that you are supporting American businesses, jobs and economies.
We value freedom above all else, for ourselves, our team, and our customers. America is the land of the free, where we all have the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We believe that one of the best ways to support those rights, is to operate and support American businesses, particularly small business.
Why Hire an America First Website Designer
There are a number of reasons why you should hire an America First Website Designer instead of using foreign resources including:
- Language Barrier
- Cultural Understanding
- Cost
- Time
- Security
- Current Technologies
- Maintenance
1: Language Barrier
In the world we live in today, communication across the globe is instantaneous, but understanding that communication is not. The English language is complicated, with a wildly vast amount of nuances in speech both written and spoken. Finding a foreign developer that understands you clearly, as well as being understandable themselves, is incredibly difficult to accomplish.
Lump on top of that the need for this rare foreign designer to fit all of the other criteria you need in a web developer such as: understanding marketing, technical capability, search engine optimization, user experience, visual dynamics and everything else you need for a successful web deployment, and you’re effectively looking for a unicorn, and unicorns aren’t cheap. (Isn’t that why you considered a foreign developer to begin with?)
On top of all of that, it is incredibly important that your website pays close attention to detail. After all, this is how your customers are going to judge you and the credibility of your business. If they see typos or grammatical errors on your website, they are going to assume that is exactly how you will handle their service or project. Is that the example any of us want to set when attempting to secure a new client or customer?
2. Cultural Understanding
When it comes to current trends in the world in fashion, filmmaking, style, media, and art, most of these are led by a handful countries between Europe and the United States. The culture of the US changes with incredible speed. It is also vastly different even amongst different regions of the country. This makes it nearly impossible for a foreign developer to keep up. What might be a perfectly appropriate phrase in their language, might be wildly inappropriate in ours and this changes on a near daily basis due to current events.
When you tack on the capacity for misinterpreting tone of voice in a written format, that cultural gap gets significantly wider in a hurry. The number one way most of us identify a spam or scam email or text message is by identifying their grammar and word use. Most of the time, as we all know, these scammers are foreign, evident by their language. Is that the way we want our own websites to appear and feel?
3. Cost
One of the biggest reasons why many businesses, (particularly smaller ones on a limited budget), consider not using an America First Website Designer, is usually cost. We have been taught over the years that foreign labor is cheaper in many instances and to be honest, this isn’t necessarily wrong. However, just because the hourly rate seems low, that doesn’t mean the actual cost is going to be lower. What you save in hourly rate often turns into grossly inflated hour reports for a number of reasons including:
- Intentionally inflated hours or underestimated hours to bait and switch the project
- Significant changes due to low work quality
- Constant misunderstanding and additional hours to fix those mistakes
- Additional call time and meetings for clarification of components
- Additional maintenance and support due to build configuration and practices
Many of these factors are consistently present in project that use foreign developers and even American Companies that utilize foreign developers under the table using what we call “White Labeling.” This is done often when an American company uses cheap labor to complete your project while charging you the same as American labor or even more on that time to pocket the additional profit.
4. Time
The average time to project completion when using a foreign team is almost always going to be significantly longer for a number reasons, including time itself. You see, the time zone difference between America and India, for example, can be anywhere from a 10-14 hour gap. This means that when you need things done during your business day, you are nearly guaranteed to wait an additional day to receive feedback on those requests, and many times even longer.
When you have to wait an average of a business day between every back and forth communication, your project timeline begins to skyrocket and what could have been done in a matter of minutes may now take days at a time. When you compile this with the opportunity for miscommunication and errors, you can see how it isn’t uncommon to see a project that would take an America First Website Designer a couple of weeks spiral into months or more with a foreign team.
5. Security
Nowadays, security is becoming more and more important all the time and the risks involved (and money at stake) for breaches is increasing by the minute. The vast majority of cyber security attacks on American companies originate from outside of the United States. In fact, a staggering number attacks on US Companies come from somewhere other than the US.
This begs the question, do we really want our sites being developed in the same places that we are being attacked from? Did you know that in many of these cultures, someone can be revered and considered “clever” for taking advantage of an American? Where your site is built is important, even if you do find a great foreign developer, you are still most likely at a greater risk of breach or cyber crime.
6. Current Technologies
The US is one of a handful of countries consistently at the forefront of technological advances. Just like our culture, the technologies we use change constantly and quickly outpace what we see in many other parts of the world. This goes without exception and particularly so, when it comes to web development.
For example, it is still quite common for foreign developers to “hard code” modifications to achieve the desired technical or visual effect they are looking for in a website. The problem with this approach, however, is that when a theme or technology changes, this can often break the site – requiring you to once again hire that same developer, costing you more time and money, to fix a problem that never should have occurred.
Current America First Website Designer for small businesses use systems and technologies that not only eliminate the need for hard coding (usually) but also allow for much greater capabilities of clients to manage their own website systems.
7. Maintenance
Closely related to the technologies of how your site is built is the need for ongoing maintenance and support. Let’s face it, as small business owners, we have so much on our plates to handle already. Isn’t this why we hired a professional web developer to handle our website for us in the first place? So trying to add maintaining our website as yet one more responsibility sounds pretty exhausting.
Now what if you had to wait a business day or more every time you needed to make a change or update your phone number or hours on your site? Imagine trying to spend these days at a time hunting down this developer and hoping they understand you the first time. Sounds like a nightmare right? Wouldn’t it make more sense if you could easily and quickly make those changes to your site within seconds by hiring an America First Website Designer?
What if it was something more difficult or complicated like an added functionality? Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone who understands you and your needs to be able to handle it during your business hours? American-made by an America First Website Designer starts to sound a little more appetizing, right?
Why Wouldn’t You Hire an America First Website Designer?
After really putting things into perspective, there’s an interesting thing that occurs when we ask ourselves this initial question. When we look at the risks involved with our time, money and business, does it not seem prudent to refine our search toward an America First Website Designer? Granted, there are always unique situations and it may be entirely possible that your particular needs can be met with a foreign team. For most of us, though, finding an affordable website design team here in the United States, such as an America First Website Designer, seems to make a lot more sense.
We hope you found this article helpful, and if you’re looking for a Texas Web Design Company or a Web Developer in Destin, FL, we’d be happy to give your project a look!