Web Development In India – Interview

Over the past year developed contries have been hit hard by the economic downturn. Almost every industry including web has suffered from the tough business environment, however for every door that closes a new one opens. Prosperous developing countries such as India have been enjoying the growth of both their infrustructure and service industrys. In an interview with Dipesh Batheja the founder of Netlings a successful software development studio based in New Delhi, he shared his thoughts and views on web development and how indias role may impact the future trends in web design and development.

On your website you make a light hearted joke about being based in India, as a company, do you find this a hindrance or does it work to your advantage when seeking prospective clients!?

We don’t find being based in India to be a hindrance. I guess whoever is related to IT industry is well aware of advantages of setting up a base in emerging economies like India. One of the primary advantages is the cost. Having said that, some people easily fall into the trap of getting things at cheapest possible rates and as the saying goes ‘What you pay is what you get’, they end up burning their hands. Some Indian IT companies do tend to focus more on this cost advantage than quality standards. This leads to a general perception that Indian companies can’t deliver quality work. That’s where we beg to differ. Our main focus has been to provide our technical knowhow and deliver expertly programmed websites to anyone who needs it on consistent basis. If we can provide a cost advantage too, that’s value added for our clients. With that light hearted comment, we hope to break the general perception so that prospective clients can see us differently.

Typically do you find that you charge less for your design and development services than competitors? Do you find it difficult hiring highly trained staff in your area?

Yes typically our charges are lesser than the competitors. This is mainly because we are a very lean studio and we don’t have all the overheads of big agencies. Our most important priority is to keep up with the highest standards of quality and customer support. I think we offer rates that are very affordable for our clients to give us work on consistent basis and still we are able to meet our costs and have decent profits.
Delhi has some of the best universities and colleges in India, so as such there is no problem in finding and hiring trained staff. If we talk specifically about web frontend development, there is some difficulty in finding highly trained people in this particular field. Probably this is because web frontend development is still to be accepted as an area demanding specialization. We counter this problem by having better processes. We concentrate on hiring talented fresh grads, give them mentorship and training and develop a work process which makes sure that their product is as good as one of our rockstar developers would deliver.

Your website has an impressive portfolio are your clients typically local, or do you work with overseas companies as well?

We have been working with local clients but our larger client base is overseas. We keep in touch with them on regular basis through emails, IMs, Skype and even occasional direct phone calls.

Do you feel that web standards and modern web design techniques are something which, are appreciated and adopted by most eastern design / development agencies?

There is a growing trend of moving towards web standards and newer design techniques. Especially companies who offer their services across the world have started embracing web standards. But unfortunately this is not the case for companies that operate only in local market. The greatest reasons is that, even though the statistics show that the usage of older browsers like IE6 has decreased worldwide, there is still a very high percentage of people in India using older browsers. So these businesses get away from the effort of training and educating their teams about newer trends in web standards and design. I guess this will fast change as awareness of advantages starts spreading further.

Do you have any tips for young entrepreneurs looking to setup design and development agencies in the east?

Web market in eastern countries like India are beginning to boom. Many businesses do recognize that there are a growing percentage of people who spend a lot of time on the Internet and therefore it is a great place to communicate with them. In fact some larger businesses are beginning to understand how they can benefit from leveraging social media and building communities around their products & services and such companies are always looking for a competitive partner who can help them build their web strategy.
Having said that, these market remain highly cost sensitive in nature. You might still find it hard to convince businesses to pay the kind of rates you can get in more developed western countries. But you can always compensate this with the scale. India is a huge market and you can always find someone ready to buy your services if you can offer decent quality at a very competitive rate.