Some thoughts on outsourcing small Web development tasks...

There are lot of online services/websites (e.g Freelancer.com) available for outsourcing small web development tasks.

If you are not having contact with web developers or web development companies, these freelance websites will be useful to find appropriate developers by going thro' their skill sets, their previous project experiences, and the feedback left for them by their previous project owners.

But these freelance websites have many short comings. First thing is, they collect significant amount as fees, and as I specified earlier few freelance sites such as vWorker give horrible experience. Especially they deal any dispute between the Buyer and Seller in horrible way. It seems few freelance sites charge money for handling any disputes or arbitrations.

So, it is NOT advisable to always use freelance sites for outsouring small web development tasks.

You can find out some web developers or web development companies from internet, and you can start outsourcing the projects to them directly. Even you can get the details of web developers from freelance sites itself. But few freelance sites discourages contacting developers directly. Mostly they won't allow sharing contact details.

This approach may have some shortcomings. The developers will be expecting the money before start doing the project. But the Project provider will be expecting to see his project completion before releasing any money to the Developers. (Because of this reason only many freelance sites earn good income).

There are lot of ways to handle this issue. One way is, the developer can estimate the price for completing the entire task. And, the Project provider can make the payment in multiple phases. But the developers can not estimate the exact time/effort required for completing the project without actually working on the project. So, they may end up with low estimation and therefore the project will end with lot of bugs.

And, another way is paying the developers on hourly rate. In this way, the project provider may not be knowing the amount of money he needed to spend for completing the project. So, normally we try to give approximate estimation for completing the initial version of the project even if the payment is based only hourly work.

I have many customers, and everyone is trying various approaches to outsource their web development and SEO tasks to me.

Based my experience, I understand that Hourly Rate works better in most situations for most of the customers.

But it seems few people confuse the effort estimation done for "hourly rate" with the "fixed price"

I need to give below explanation with this kind of confusion arises.

If I say 5 hours as estimated time for doing something, it is just a rough estimate for completing initial version, it doesn't mean that I need to spend extra hours for fixing any bugs. In that case it won't be a hourly billing but a fixed price.

In case of fixed price we need to do estimation by adding extra hours for testing and bug fixing.

You can subscribe to our Email posts, and you can bookmark this blog for further reading, or you can subscribe to our blog feed.