Using Freelance Services

Question

Can anyone share any advice or experiences using any of the many freelance gun for hire sites out there like guru.com?

I may be leading a small development team soon to run a project that will from time to time need outside help and I'd rather farm out some components that can be well defined up front in the event that the team and myself get overwhelmed or behind.

I'm thinking everything from local developers on craigslist to some outsourced services, but haven't had much experience with either.

Thanks

Answer 1

well regardless of site that you use you're almost always going to get a bunch of offers that are either automatic or are damn close to it from various dev groups. Your best bet is to detail out what the required skills are in detail (i.e. not just experience with php5, but more along the lines of experience of use php5 along with jquery to parse json results into...)..

some of the freelance sites are better (at least it seems to me) than others for specific needs.. ie. elance i go to whenever i need copywriting. i'll use odesk (because of their tracking ability) for any coding projects that are more than just simple scripts...

As for finding designers.. i usually go through http://creattica.com/ and take a look at the portfolios there..

Make sure that your requirements are solid/straightforward as well as whatever timeline you setup with whoever you work with (as well as what happens if the timeline is broken.. )

Answer 2

My best experience has been using local developers(craigslist) in the same city. Odesk for programming, E-commerce, Python, Perl.