Web Designers – New Revenue or Obsolete?

In the beginning, the web designer was king of the Internet and the majority of the revenue associated with it. Ben Crouch, Collaboration & Messaging Product Manager, reports on how this old truth is coming to light again.

Over time those same small businesses kept their trusty web designers busy with requests to further enhance their online presence and empower their employees to harness the power of the Internet. Sites started to incorporate forms to allow structured requests to be submitted, and with this many organisations started taking their tentative first steps towards the world of online retailing. Further access to email was rolled out to most areas of the business and so the web designer also became an email administrator; getting up multiple POP3 accounts, configuring storage limits and patiently talking the office manager through the necessary steps required to successfully connect end user email clients and to their accounts.

The seemingly perfect marriage of providing web content and email services wasn’t set to last. Web designers continued to hone their skills and provide yet more functionality on the websites they supplied. Databases dynamically powered products & prices, extranets improved efficiencies with suppliers & partners, and content management systems gave editorial control back to their customers.

However the simplicity of POP3, which had once made it so easy to provide email services alongside web content, become a constraint against the increase in functionality customers were demanding. Improvements in connectivity, coupled with easily available static IP addresses meant that businesses could deploy their own mail servers with SMTP feeds, attracted by features such as shared calendars, a central contacts list & out of office replies. The need for POP3 declined, as did the motivation web designers had to manage email for their customers.

Fast forward to the present day; many designers and design houses are still not providing email services to their end customers. There is certainly revenue associated with providing a customer with a business grade email solution, but why become an expert in an application like Microsoft Exchange? Deploying a solution and managing it on an ongoing basis simply isn’t appealing to most design houses. What most don’t appreciate though, is that this revenue though isn’t necessarily out of reach.

Hosting providers have long been providing hosted email services, offering all the functionality you get from an on-site solution coupled with the luxury of not needing to understand applications such as Exchange, or to even visit the customer’s site to deploy and manage the solution. The underlying platforms which deliver these applications are becoming more cost effective. This coupled with the fact that control panels are getting slicker; suddenly the provision and management of business grade, feature rich email is even easier than the days of POP3.

The modern day hosted email solution has everything a customer could get from having their own on premise mail server – and more! When you consider the resiliency and security these solutions offer, as well as, ease of access via a client, the web or mobile device, the decision to place email in the cloud becomes a no brainer. What makes it even more compelling is the ability to easily drop additional modules into the mix. You only have to look at hosting providers who supply Hosted Microsoft Exchange at the core of their portfolio, to see that they are also offering the ability for their resellers to also easily deliver SharePoint, Dynamics CRM and Office Communication Server with VoIP to their customers.

Designers really do have something new and compelling to discuss with their customers who currently manage email servers in house, for those with customers still running on individual POP3 accounts, there is finally an upgrade path away from POP3, at a price they can afford, delivering the functionality they require. By supplying email services to their customers, and benefiting from the associated revenue the web designer once again becomes king of the Internet.