Quite a while ago – i decided that my company website need sprucing up – and that powershell and vbscript just aren’t going to cut it anymore as some of the automation pieces we write for clients get more and more complex.
So… what to do?
Well, after finding a couple of web-design places that were locally based, i got a few quotes – for a basic visual re-design of my website, i’ll update the content… while there was approx 15 pages – most of these were the same template page just with different text, so probably only 4 or 5 unique pages… logo’s etc were already done, but some other gfx would need to be updated.
The quotes, well, for the places that bothered to quote, were ridiculous, $5000 at the low end, $8000 at the high end.
So, i gave up on this idea for a while… and then i thought i would give freelancer.com a go.
On the coding side – one of my guys cuts 1/2 decent .NET code, the rest of us script well, but are kind of hacks when it comes to .NET. (we can do it, but not well!)
Back to the webpage: I posted the job – and recieved a slew of SPAM responses, some legitimate ones and a wide variation in prices, from $30 to $250… with an average price of approx $200.
Freelancer.com makes you place a price range on your project – and many of the bids come back at the higest price in the range – i assume just because of pure laziness…. i have learnt that these bids can be ignored immediately – as these are generally from the people that haven’t bothered to read the spec at all and just send a template response.
I ended up choosing one of the lower bids who had good reviews – and to my surprise, he delivered…. it wasnt perfect – and his knowledge of asp/aspx was non-existant (i had to end up doing the contact form) – but considering the price i paid and the turn around time (of less than a week) – it actually turned out pretty good.
Lets be clear though, it was a very small project, there were communication issues (the freelancer was inidian) and when he could not get the asp page working, he wanted to fuck around with my web server – which is something he clearly had no skills in…. so that caused some tension.
I also posted a coding project – which the winning bidder never did anything, except make excuses and tell me it would be done “tommorow”.
I have now re-posted the project and have learnt from the 1st experience… and am trying to ensure the freelancer can actually complete the work before awarding the project… however i think the communication differences could pose an issue – as this is has some more complex concepts in it.
On to freelancer itself…. well, the site is not intuitive at all, its difficult to use, clunky and just messy. Their support people do seem to reply relatively promptly – but the unfortunate side is that for a first time user, i needed to send them quite a few emails on how to do what i would see as basic things…. and found that certain things need to be done by emailing support, which is disappointing.
The charging model employed by freelancer also comes across as a little dodgey, but i’ll re-evaluate once im a bit more used to the site.
