Why, As Web Developers, Do We Operate From Thailand?
Filed under: Internet
I’m going back four and a half years now, when the bubble that had burst a while back from then was having hugely negative effects on the web design industry as a whole. Eventually, and in hindsight naturally, the web design agency I was working for collapsed under the weight of insufficient revenues, high staff costs and, worst of all, nearly a million dollars in unpaid debt from the telco part of the business.
Taken unawares, I suppose, but as a result extraordinary revenues had to be generated each month to pay the huge salary bills and rent in an office in the centre of London. They weren’t being met.
To break even, we needed consistent revenues of £60,000 a month. To give you some idea of the scale of this, our company in Bangkok would, including salaries, rent, taxes, etc. but excluding developers costs, survive with that one monthly income for over forty months.
At my previous company our marketing strategy was high-end and search engine marketing was not something that was taken too seriously. In the event, we could never have survived as a company with false expectations in a market gone sour, especially with the cutbacks in the corporate sector on web-related projects. After four years of working on some exceptional sites, we were broke.
All of us had worked for six months for free, running up all sorts of debts, on the promise that we would be paid in full when the telco deal came through. It didn’t.
Coincidentally, I received an unexpected email from a friend and, to cut a long story short, he got me out here to start up my own web company. I work in an office in the centre of Bangkok that costs us nothing, as the real estate company we’re associated with, Soho Properties Co., Ltd., owns the lease and the two companies share the same owner.
Our staff costs are very reasonably priced in comparison to the UK. I have looked for quality, reliable professionals, specifically from Pakistan and India, to build the business. We’re in contact with our Pakistani developers every day, where we plan, manage and develop ongoing projects. We are also associated with a company in India, who have far greater staff levels and can therefore take on much larger and complex sites.
Our Pakistani developers have helped raise the profile of our portfolio to a level that much larger companies are looking to employ our services. Most of our enquiries do not come from within Thailand itself; in fact, we have a very limited number of Thai clients. Our clients are based in the UK, America, Germany, France, Austria, Monte Carlo, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Brunei.
A few months ago, when I was visiting my father in the UK, I met up with my old boss. He told me he was charging £2,000 for a static 5-page website. Since then, I have set out to are compete in the UK market for business as well as Bangkok as I figure that you don’t have to be glued to any specific location if you can communicate online.
This site has been named and optimised for the express purpose of placement on the search engines, where we hope to generate interest in our services and demonstrate, with our portfolio, what we have been able to build up in the past three years.
Media Director of Web Site Design UK, provides web site design and SEO services. Web Site Design UK provides individual and corporate websites, including Flash design, which create fully interactive animated websites, eCommerce shopping cart solutions, content management systems and WordPress integration. Web design is not simply about aesthetics, it also has a serious place for businesses to succeed and our search engine placement secures our positioning strategies will achieve marketable results for our clients.
Tags: cms, Flash design, seo outsourcing, Web Site Design UK
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