Inevitably, you are going to come to a point where you need to make a decision about how to grow your website or online communications efforts. Do you buy an off-the-shelf product or build a custom solution for content management, member management or an online community? There are a lot of options out there from Software as a Service (SaaS) models to open source tools.
The implications of your decision are clear: cost, implementation time, impact on your organizational process, and long-term management. How do you decide?
For more clarity on whether to buy an off-the-shelf product or build a custom website or online management system, just ask yourself these questions:
- What can my organization afford today?
- What are our financial limitations? Could anything change these restrictions?
- Am I trying to reduce costs now or in the future?
- How tech savvy are we? How committed are we to being tech savvy?
- How flexible is our process? (Are we really doing things the way we want to?)
- Is our process efficient?
- Do we expect our management process to change in the next year?
Don’t just think about these questions. Ask your colleagues and leaders. Write out your answers. Be honest about what you’ve written down.
And, let me know if there are any other questions you asked that helped you make your decision.
[...] today, it’s important to consider whether it may need one in a few years. That way you can build your website to accommodate future phases. Below, I’ve evaluated 3 approaches to building multi-lingual sites [...]