Plenty of startup companies are seeking their web presence through a simple website or an interactive web portal. To accomplish the web development task they try to find the resources on internet. They search for resources using keywords like freelance web developer, freelance web development or freelance web designers. Either they end up seeing some blog of freelancer or they reach to the freelance heaven websites like rentacoder, getacoder, getafreelancer, elance or odesk. Such sites have millions of cheap freelancers registered with them. You may put a project and you can get as many as 50-100 bids for your project in a day. This sounds fascinating initially but it’s just a beginning of process. The trouble starts now. Here are few difficulties you will face at initial stage.
1. You have overwhelming bids that makes the choice difficult for you.
2. Every one of them tells you that they are the best, but hardly few of them are actually telling the truth.
3. You may not find just one freelance web developer meets all your needs, Mr. A meets 50% matching requirements and Mr. B and Mr. C meets 25% each, that increases your troubles.
SO finally you selected someone with all your agreements on price and estimate, now you may see the second largest pool of difficulties
1. The communication is a major issue, the freelancer does not reply emails on time and neither do they remain online all the day because they have their full time jobs elsewhere (that jobs pay the full time income)
2. The freelancer is a lone person but the project of web development needs different skills like project requirement analysis, design the website mockup, HTML conversion, programming in PHP or.Net, quality test and delivery. Normally not one person does all. This invites problem #3
3. The freelancer either asks you to manage other resources for him or he goes and finds other freelancers to help him; that comes on higher price. So you waste lot of time while your selected freelance web designer is busy finding help for him.
4. As I said in point #1, most of the freelancers have their full time jobs, such jobs demand lot of time and energy, so freelance web designers or developers work on odd hours or they just do not work on some days when they are busy with their full time jobs. Such behavior causes further delay to your project delivery.
5. You may come across various excuses for not delivering of your projects, some common excuses are “I am not well since few days”, some emotional excuses like “My mother/father/daughter/wife is not well so I am in hospital”. Such excuses are emotional blackmailing techniques that can make you believe that the freelancer is in trouble while he is actually trying to buy some more time.
6. Most of the Freelance web developers are over loaded with work because of their cheap hourly rates. Such overloading can make you suffer the delay in your web development project. That increase more frustration.
7. The major problem you could come across is that the freelancer disappears after you paid him advance money for your project. Certain freelancers have many accounts created on odesk, elance, getacoder, rentacoder, getafreelancer kind of websites, so they would stop responding you and neither do they will return your initial money.
So your plan of saving money could end up losing money and time, losing time is more expensive than losing money.
How do you prevent this, here are simple reasons to select a small web development company compared to a freelance web developer.
1. The company has long term plan, so web development companies are professional.
2. Company has many resources for web design, web development, quality testing and deployment so your project never suffers a delay.
3. Company has a legal name, legal offices so web development companies can sign a contract with you, a freelancer never signs a contract or signing contract with freelancer has no meaning.
4. A web development company has many back resources so even if some developer or designer does not show up, the company can replace them with other developers, your work never suffer.
5. A web development company takes money on milestones, so your money and project both are secure.
6. Most important point is communication. You can get a good communicating people in web development companies because the manager is always a well experienced person; he takes all responsibilities of problems and payments.
Above all its peace of mind when you work with web development companies, it comes at little extra cost but with lot of amenities as described above.
Choice is yours, select a freelance web designer and ruin your web development project or select a web development company and run a successful web based business.
Mahendra Sharma is a CEO of Sharma Infoway, an Indian Web Development Company. Sharma Infoway is serving small and mid size companies for their web development projects.
Author: Mahendra Sharma
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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