The strategy of the expert or specialist

It is quite surprising how few experts and specialists realise the strategic importance of their personal Web site. Yet, it is how people are going to judge them when they consider hiring their services. It doesn't have to be an all singing, all dancing Web site (in fact, an over gimmicky site can be as off putting on the Web as loud and flashy clothes can be in the world of bricks and mortar). All that is needed is an efficient description of the service or utility that is being made available.

Although it is hard to generalise, if we consider a hypothetical case of a typical expert it'll give some idea of the broad concepts involved. Let's take the case of an expert in vector graphics. This is a special type of graphics that provides low bandwidth pictures, animations and navigational maps frequently used for Web pages (Macromedia's Flash products are based upon vector graphics). Although almost any programmer or Web page designer could quickly learn to make superficial use of vector graphics, few designers will have time to become truly expert because vector graphics is just one of many hundreds of speciality areas that are used in Web site design strategies.

The managed team approach would be to get one of the team designers to create a suitable vector graphic when the need arises. This the designer could do, but, it is probable that this is not something they would be doing all the time. As a consequence, the managed team designer is likely to produce a vector graphic solution slower, less efficiently and possibly inferior to a solution that could be produced by a designer who did nothing else but vector graphics.

A busy contractor, seeing a possibility for a vector graphic application in a Web site design might well consider getting a specialist to produce the vector graphic if they knew somebody who could do this kind of work efficiently, cheaply and reliably. The vector graphics specialist, being thoroughly familiar with all the techniques, the pitfalls, the problems and the possibilities in this narrow niche area, would likely be able to produce a vector graphic in far less time than it would take the contractor. This would allow the specialist to charge a good price for his or her time, yet, this price appear to be a bargain to the contractor.

In this way, the contractor would effectively be using an ancestor message path to inherit the skills of the specialist in vector graphics. As far as the contractor's client is concerned, it is the contractor who is the expert in vector graphics. The graphic designer wouldn't worry about being credited because it would be the contractor they'd want to establish and maintain a co-operative relationship with, not the contractor's client. The better they can make the contractor look, the more chance they will have of the contractor getting more work for them to do.

If a Web site design is broken up into many little speciality areas, with each area being outsourced to an expert, it is easy to see how a whole project can be created far more expertly and probably at less cost than with an in house, managed team. This would see the role of the contractor becoming more of a middleman than a manager and able to produce expert solutions with a minimum of overheads. This way of working is possible because of the efficiency of the Internet communication environment, which allows a variety of specialists and experts to be contacted quickly and easily.