As you’ll notice, the new Flatsourcing.com site has been undergoing major upgrades as we’ve been focusing on growing our business and connecting with our clients more than ever through this blog.

We all feel like our logo needs a little freshening up. I thought that we would share the collaborative process around our logo update here on the blog to give you an idea of how the flatsourcing communication process flow works. Since this is a nice compact project, we’re going to share what would typically be our team interaction on BaseCamp publicly here on the blog. Here’s the current logo with my comments for Alex, our lead designer:

• I would like to see something slightly more modern. 1) An iteration with all lowercase and 2) only the first letters of “flat” and “sourcing” capitalized. Both of these would soften it from the all-caps have currently
• can we try a brighter blue and a dark gray rather than the black?
• for the globe, rather than achieving the 3-D effect through the longitude and latitude lines, can we do this through rendering and shadowing

I look forward to seeing several mockups of the logo.

Let’s set a deadline for this as one week from today (Feb 7) to have the logo finalized. (The final day to submit logos for BarCamp New Orleans is next Thursday and I want to have our new logo on the T-shirt.

We’d love to hear comments from any readers in this public updating of our logo. In addition, for the flatsourcing team lets keep our commenting here on the blog so everybody can see our input.

Well there isn’t just one. You’ll find several here. We’ve developed a model that works. It’s not a get rich quick scheme (you’ll still have to work just as hard), but we can help you improve the quantity and quality of your clients by providing them quality development.

We’re not selling a scheme or a system. We sell development. We have offices in Kazan, Russia where our team works everyday. What we offer you is information on how to work with them to improve your efficiency. You can learn more about us here. For now let me give you some tips on outsourcing:

When you move your development offices abroad, you can’t micromanage your employees because they aren’t (literally) sitting in front of you. You’re essentially creating a trade off: micromanagement for cost.

The thing is micromanagement probably took up way too much of your time anyways. Now, you have a developer somewhere else and you can’t watch his every move. So what do you do?

You learn how to communicate. At the end of the day, good communication is what will make you succeed in your development pursuits. Now that sounds oversimplified – it is.

By good communication I mean:

• Tools – Video conferencing, project management tools, VoIP, and patience and respect
• Empathy – What is your new employees schedule? Find out how best to work together. Take time to see it from your employees time zone/perspective/level of communication.
• Goal Setting – You have to create goals for yourself and your team. They can’t hit your goals unless you establish them and communicate them effectively. Most people get this most important point all wrong.
• Trust – You can’t have a good working relationship without it. Trust until it’s broken. Then find the manager and tell them about it. Just because you got burned by some developers in (country here) back in (year here), doesn’t mean its going to happen every time. We have all been there.

Stay tuned: You’ll hear more info on each of those points from me. If you want to make sure you don’t miss it, RSS our blog.

Will

I’m very excited to commemorate the launch of the new Flatsourcing.com website in this blog post. Oleg, Alex, Timur, Will & I have all been hard at work over the month developing the new site and working on our positioning and branding.

Our new site is a WordPress blog that will enable us to continually update our team, our clients, and our community about what’s going on with Flatsourcing and our thoughts on the greater world of web development and outsourcing.

As important as the blog is our new more focused branding and growth strategy. We spent a lot of time and soul-searching figuring out what it really is that Flatsourcing does, and what it is that our clients value about Flatsourcing.

One of the common threads running through all our discussions is that we are web developers for web developers and industry professionals. Our clients are web development firms, web application companies, and experts on the Internet. We are their back end. A lot of the work we do for clients is a piece of their greater puzzle.

In that sense, what we do well is private label web development

We’re thrilled about the launch of the new site, and appreciate all of the input from our clients and friends in this process. We’ve got our new website up, and were ready to rock!

If you or anybody you know needs great web development, get in touch with us.