Offshore website design that runs on written specs.

An offshore web team works from a country many hours away, in your CMS and repository, from specs you’ve written down. The Philippines runs on UTC+8 and India on UTC+5:30, with no daylight saving in either. Both are most of a working day ahead of the US.

Egypt runs on UTC+2, or UTC+3 in summer since it restored daylight saving in 2023. A team there that starts late can share a short window with your East Coast morning.

The model trades live conversation for cost and overnight progress. Pages built while you sleep are waiting for review when your day starts, as long as nobody needed to ask you a question first.

Source: IANA Time Zone Database

Offshore works where the answer is already written down. The clearer the spec, the better the fit.

Offshore web work runs on handoffs, not calls. Here’s a typical cycle for a US company with a team in the Philippines.

Every unclear ticket costs a day. If a developer hits a question about spacing, a missing state or a broken link, they either guess or wait for your morning.

A good offshore ticket links the exact Figma frame, lists every state (hover, focus, error, empty), names the breakpoints and says what’s out of scope. For migrations, attach the URL map and the content rules. For QA, attach the checklist and the browser matrix.

An accessibility pass is a good offshore task when the standard is written down. WCAG 2.2, published by the W3C, is the usual reference. It added criteria that are easy to miss in a build. Examples include minimum target sizes, focus that isn’t hidden behind sticky headers, and help placed consistently across pages.

Give the team the success criteria you’re testing against, a template for logging issues and a rule for what blocks launch. Keep the judgment calls, like rewriting a confusing form, for the people who designed it.

Source: W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2

With fewer shared hours, access rules do more of the work. Put these in writing before launch:

Source: US Copyright Office, Circular 30: Works Made for Hire

Under US copyright law, contractor work counts as work made for hire only in nine listed categories. It also needs a signed written agreement. Offshore work often passes through more hands, so ask your counsel to confirm the assignment covers everyone who touches the site, wherever they sit.

Fewer shared hours mean slower answers to new questions. On a website, that hurts most before the designs are final and during launch week. Keep these closer to your team:

Cost falls as distance grows, and so do shared hours. Here’s how the models compare for website work.

Many companies get the best result from a blend: decisions and design in your hours, specified production offshore. The blend only works if the people who made the designs write the specs and review what comes back.

At OTRO, sites are designed and built by a senior team in your time zone, the same people who build product. Some projects include work that suits offshore production, such as a large migration or a template rollout. When yours does, we’ll say so in our plan and explain how review would work.