Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 27, 2008 -- The Design People, Inc., a leading provider of websites headquartered in the U.S., today celebrated the 5th anniversary of its Manila, Philippines operations. Since 1999, The Design People, Inc. has evolved from a boutique web design studio to an international business offering Internet marketing, web design and development services to thousands of real estate professionals and small business customers.

"In 2003, four years after we started The Design People Inc. (http://www.thedesignpeople.com) in Los Angeles, We made a strategic move to open a production office overseas. The Philippines was a natural choice for us. The raw creative talent in Manila combined with the fact that two of the three owners including myself are Filipino made the decision easy," said Luigi Amante, COO. "We are very grateful to our customers and team members who helped get us here and are very proud of this accomplishment."

The Design People office in Manila was opened with just five people. That core team has steadily grown into a fully staffed production team of over 100 trained web designers, web consultants and programmers. The office enabled The Design People to become profitable and currently supports over 60 U.S.-based project managers, web strategists and salespeople.

"When I first migrated back to the Philippines to run the office, one of the biggest challenges at the time was that the pervasive broadband and IT infrastructure I was used to in the U.S. didn't come cheap or fast back then," said Mike Bitanga, General Manager of The Design People, Inc. Manila (http://www.thedesignpeople.ph). "I remember the first few weeks very clearly. We literally had set up computers on the boxes they arrived in and the design team went straight to work - uploading the code using dial-up Internet phone cards. Despite the lack of resources early on, we surprised ourselves at how quickly we began producing some of the most amazing web design work we had done to date."

Today, The Design People has expanded its Manila operations to a fully outfitted production office and contact center with dedicated fiber optic Internet connections. The company has also invested heavily in communication technology including high definition video conferencing for meetings, customer relationship management (CRM) system, internal blogs, company intranet, instant messaging and VOIP.

"The Design People, Inc. was one of the first web development firms in the Philippines to practice 'insourcing'. Instead of contracting another company to perform the work, we built a design firm in Manila from the ground up and hired great web designers. Our group here has proven to be a huge competitive advantage for us. More so, because we own the office we have the flexibility we need to tweak our processes as we go and adapt to changes very rapidly," said Tiger Bitanga, CEO. "For example, we developed our own proprietary project management software specifically to send tasks between our teams. We're also building a brand as one of the tech companies to work for in Manila. Both would be difficult to achieve if we had went with a traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) approach."

To help celebrate its fifth year in Manila, plans have also begun on a special awards contest and annual event to recognize the work of Filipino web designers organized by The Design People, Inc. We anticipate hundreds of entries for categories including Best of the Web 2008 and many more. Profits from the event will go to charity.

About The Design People, Inc.

The Design People, Inc. is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) developer of online web applications for real estate agents, brokers, contractors and small businesses worldwide. We provide web development, hosting, branding and Internet marketing services for companies of all sizes.

Based in Los Angeles, The Design People, Inc. licenses and maintains websites for thousands of customers. For more information please visit http://www.thedesignpeople.com, or call 1-800-979-5799.

Copyright (c) 2008 The Design People, Inc. All rights reserved.

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