I’m usually a one-stop shop for anything web or design related. If I don’t know it, I’ll often take the time to learn it… or I just won’t take the job. But you can’t do that when you are yr own client. In building DubFiler, I hit a couple roadblocks and either couldn’t learn the stuff myself, or didn’t want to take the time.
Flash is one of the few ways to get a progress bar when uploading a file. There are Javascript methods, but I didn’t want to get into it. So I fiddled around with Flash for a bit and then decided I’d rather have someone else build it.
DubFiler uses the Zend Framework. I was taught to use it but never to optimize it. Once I’d build the core site functionality, I wanted another pair of eyes (ideally those of an expert) to to tighten things up and implement caching, plugins and abstraction to make it run faster.
I dug around and Elance and Guru seemed to be the most popular sites for finding freelancers. They’ve each got their reputations and stories (links intentionally omitted here), but any big site is going to have people with bad experiences. So I created accounts and posted my projects on both sites. Posting a project was easy. I got a number of responses for both projects and chose the person I wanted to hire.
Neither site makes it easy to understand the process of working with someone. There are milestones, invoices, payments, agreements, messages, files… on and on. Each of these components has it’s use, but they seem really tacked on so there’s no flow to the process. I kept trying to add money to the escrow, but the person has to invoice first. Then I have to approve the invoice. Then I can fund. When they’re done, can I release the funds? No. I have to approve the milestone. Whoops, I never set a milestone… If I was a bigger company, I might want all these features or I might legally need them to happen in a specific order. I get that. But both sites have links to these things scattered throughout your account page. What a mess.
But I digress. For the Flash project I wound up hiring a guy in India who did a great job. I wrote up a spec and he completed it in record time. I needed a few tweaks and he did them just fine. Since the Zend project was more vague and required more expertise, I wound up hiring a guy in New Hampshire. I chose him in part because he seemed really experienced, but also in part so language and time zones wouldn’t be an issue.
Both hires proved to be great choices, and I feel I got my money’s worth. I plan to continue to work with both of them. I would like to see better options for finding these guys. If I’m correct in saying the elance and guru.com are the two biggest players, then the “hire a freelancer” space could still use some innovation.