Fair Outsourcing Frequently Asked Questions

First steps - what do I need to design a website?

• a clear idea of the purpose of the site and its audience
• a list of features you want to fulfill that purpose (blog, photo gallery, product catalog, paypal etc.)
• a set of initial keywords to research and base written content on
• ideas about page layout and site navigation (make a list of existing sites you like)
• images & logo - are they available or do they need to be created? What colors do you like?
• domain name ideas - mycompany.com, mynonprofit.org, mysite.net

What is a "green website" and what difference can that make?

• Loading a website on your computer requires electricity that is largely generated by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Improving energy efficiency and reducing our carbon footprint are increasingly seen as essential to reducing the effects of climate change. A 2007 Gartner study found that for the first time in history, the carbon emissions due to information and communication technologies exceeded that of the entire aviation industry. According to Green Data Center Info , by 2020 the web hosting industry alone will surpass the airline industry as carbon emitters.
  Eco-cautious clients looking for “Green Web Design” run up against many of the same obstacles that people who want to buy organic or install solar power – the high co$t of being green. People often find conventional food and energy to be easier to acquire and cheaper for their wallet (but a much heavier tax on the environment). In other words, going green can be more expen$ive and the system often makes it cheaper to be environmentally wasteful.
  The same can be said of website programming. Most of the "do it yourself” website authoring programs on the market today appear to be cheaper in terms of time/co$t benefit, but they are also notorious for generating websites full of bloated and unwieldy source code and graphics that waste energy and can be very slow loading. Websites with bloated source code are actually bad for business. Customers often lose patience and interest while waiting for slow loading sites to appear on-screen. Sure, you may have a fast connection, but potential clients may not. The nimble website of the competition is more likely to catch their eye. SEO (search engine optimization) is also hindered by bloated code. Lean concise code and fewer animations make your website content become more relevant and easier to index in Google resulting in higher search engine rankings.
  Most website authoring programs urge the use of all the bells and whistles of supposedly cutting edge web design – glowing buttons, flashy animations, and superfluous widgets galore.  But the needs of eco-cautious clients can most often be met without all these trivial extra features and unnecessary complexity.  Simpler graphics and concise clean source code can communicate just fine without all the wasteful distractions pushed by the latest high tech and cheap programming software.
  But how expensive can it be to create a less wasteful website? Is having someone actually custom write terse source code for a website that communicates eloquently, looks great, saves energy, and loads faster too co$tly?
  Not necessarily . . .
  Fair Outsourcing in Bolivia specializes in very affordable custom written code that is “short but sweet” enough to fit the bill and to achieve your goals. We know how to make sure images are compressed and optimized for the web, use fewer complex graphics and widgets, and are experts at designing nimble websites that are as eloquent, eye-catching, and energy efficient as possible – all at a price that can´t be beat. To save even more energy, we can host your green website on an eco-friendly internet hosting service.
  Because of Bolivia´s low cost of living, we can offer extremely competitive pricing while also offering the fair trade of living wage jobs with good working conditions in Bolivia – a country with one of the lowest carbon footprints on the planet.
  read more: Does the carbon footprint of a website really matter?, Reduce Code Bloat for Better SEO Results, Are Energy Efficient Websites The Future And Does Anyone Care?, SEO Best Practices for Coding Your Website

Do Darker colors on a website save energy?

• Dark “Low Wattage Palettes” have been touted as a greener option for energy efficient web design. Question is, do darker colors really use less energy? While old CRT monitors used to use more energy when displaying light colors, most of today’s flat screen LCD monitors use about the same or even more energy to display darker ones. So the future of energy efficient websites appears to be brighter rather than darker. Other considerations when picking a pallette of colors for your website include color blindness, usability, ink costs for printed web pages and basic asthetics. If darker colors are used, alternative CSS sheets to optimize printing efficiency are advisable so if someone simply must have a hard copy, they won´t waste all their ink and paper getting one. Fact is, writing a site using terse source code and fewer complex graphics and widgets and using green hosting services will net much more energy savings today.

FAQ's about SEO and Keywords

What is SEO?

• SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it is the process of improving ranking in search engine results in order to improve the volume and/or quality of traffic to a website through search engine queries.

How does search engine optimization work?

• There are a variety of techniques involved in making a website more search engine friendly, but the most important are 1) writing content and background code that includes frequently searched keywords and phrases, so as to be more relevant to what most people are searching for, and 2) creating reciprocal links (to and from) related external websites.

Why is search engine optimization important?

• With literally billions of webpages to index, it is easy to get buried at the bottom of a list of search engine results and thus never get seen. Proper SEO keyword research, coding, and copywriting makes your site more visible and easier to find.
  read more: Search engine optimization

What are keywords?

• Keywords are the individual words and entire phrases or sentences people enter into search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing in order to find what they are looking for on the internet. Specific keywords and phrases can become fashionable in looking for certain things, but what people use can change over time. By following these keyword trends, you can use them to describe what you are offering on your website and thus make it easier to find.

What keywords are people searching for? How to get the right keywords?

• SEO keyword research tells you what terms people are actually using to find the information or product your site is offering. A more sophisticated analysis can highlight particularly strategic keywords that are both popular in searches, but also seldom used on other people´s websites.
• For example, your site may be offering "widgets" but in reality, research shows that "gadgets" is the term most people are searching for. Sophisticated research shows that "cool gadgets" is an extremely popular search phrase that few other competing websites are using. By incorporating "cool gadgets" into your website content and code, you have a great chance of attracting a large amount of quality traffic to your site and rank higher in search engine results.
  • read more: Keywords - What Are They, How To Use Them, And Why They Are Important
    

What is Google Analytics?

• Google Analytics is a way of learning very specific information about your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. By incorporating tracking code into each of the pages on your website, this system provides detailed information on the location of visitors to your website, what content they are viewing, and how they respond to your ads, marketing initiatives, and online offers.
  • read more: Google Analytics

FAQ's about bilingual websites and localization

Why make a bilingual website?

• A bilingual website can greatly expand your audience worldwide. While the internet was once a primarily English speaking domain, this has changed radically in the past decade. Today, less than a third of internet users are English speaking. Spanish is the third most used language in the web today and is by far the most widely spoken western language after English.
  • read more: Top Ten Languages Used in the Web

What is website localization?

• Website localization goes beyond merely a rough word by word translation of the content. Localization is a much more sophisticated interpretation and re-presentation of website content so that it is truly accessible, usable, and culturally suitable. Such a task can never be adequately done by automated translators.
  • read more: Culture and Website Localization

FAQ's about Fair Trade and Social Outsourcing

What is fair trade?

• Fair Trade is a response to the failure of conventional trade to deliver sustainable livelihoods and development opportunities to people in the poorest countries of the world. . . The Fair Trade movement shares a vision of a world in which justice and sustainable development are at the heart of trade structures and practices so that everyone, through their work, can maintain a decent and dignified livelihood and develop their full human potential.
  • read more: Fair trade, Fair Trade Charter, Fair trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO)
  • Fair Trade and Social Enterprise Links

What is an Alternative Trading Organization?

• Alternative trading organizations have Fair Trade at the core of their mission and activities, using it as a development tool to support disadvantaged producers and to reduce poverty, and combine their marketing with awareness-raising and campaigning.
  • read more: Alternative Trading Organization
    

What is outsourcing? Why do companies outsource?

• Outsourcing involves subcontracting with another company to provide services that might otherwise be performed by in-house employees. Why do companies outsource: to save money, allow you to focus your resources and attention on more important, broader issues, and to access the kind of professional expertise that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house.

What is Social Outsourcing?

• Social outsourcing is "IT outsourcing with a human face; with a social conscience and a development agenda. The point is this: there's an ever-growing market for IT outsourcing from the heavyweights. Why not use that for development purposes?" (Richard Heeks)
• Socially responsible outsourcing encourages buyers to hire firms that meet any two of the following three criteria: (1) Located in a poor or very poor region (in a developing economy, as defined by the International Monetary Fund or a poor region within an emerging economy ) (2) Micro-, small-, or mid-sized (employing between 1 and 249 people) (3) Owned by, or employ a majority of, economically or socially disadvantaged people (including women, ethnic minorities, and inhabitants of economically depressed regions such as rural areas and slum communities.) ( Leila Chirayath Janah and Joy Sun)
  • read more:
  • Social Outsourcing and Fair Trade in IT
  • Richard Heeks speaks on 'Social Outsourcing and Fair Trade in IT' in an audio interview with GKP
  • Socially responsible outsourcing

What is a social enterprise?

• Social enterprises are social mission driven organizations which apply market-based strategies to achieve a social purpose. The movement includes both non-profits that use business models to pursue their mission and for-profits whose primary purposes are social. Social enterprises are distinctive because their social or environmental purpose remains central to their operation.
  • read more: Social enterprise, About social enterprise