Many startups seek their web presence through a simple website or an interactive portal. To complete web development tasks, they try to find resources on the internet. They search for resources using keywords like freelance web developer, freelance web development or freelance web designer. Or they end up seeing a freelancer blog or on a freelancer heaven site like rentacoder, getacoder, getafreelancer, elance or odesk. Millions of cheap freelancers are registered on these sites. You can post a project and within a day you can get up to 50-100 bids on your project. This sounds nice at first, but it’s just the beginning of the process. The trouble starts now. Here are some of the difficulties you will encounter during the initial phase.
1. You have overwhelming offers that make it difficult to make a choice.
2. They all tell you they are the best, but almost none of them are telling the truth.
3. You may not be able to find a freelance web developer that meets all your needs. Mr. A meets 50% of the matching requirements and Mr. B and Mr. C meet 25% each, adding to your problems.
So in the end you go with someone who has all the agreements on price and estimates now you’re probably looking at the second biggest difficulty
1. Communication is a big problem, freelancers don’t answer emails on time and aren’t online all day because they have full time jobs elsewhere (work pays full time income)
2. Freelancers are loners, but website development projects require different skills such as analyzing project requirements, designing website mockups, HTML transformations, PHP or .Net programming, quality testing and delivery. Usually not one person does everything. This begs question #3
3. The freelancer asks you to help him manage other resources, or he finds other freelancers to help him, the price is higher. So you can waste a lot of time while your chosen freelance web designer is busy trying to find help for them.
4. As I mentioned in point 1, most freelancers have full-time jobs that require a lot of time and effort, so freelance web designers or developers work zero hours or they just work on certain days. Not busy with their full time job. Such actions can further delay the delivery of your project.
5. You may come across different excuses for not delivering your project, some common excuses are “I’m not feeling well these days”, some emotional excuses like “My mother/father/daughter/wife, I’m not feeling well, so I’m in the hospital”. Excuses like this are an emotional blackmail technique that can make you believe the freelancer is in trouble, when in reality they are buying more time.
6. Most freelance web developers are overworked due to low hourly rates. This overload can delay your web development projects. This creates even more frustration.
7. The biggest problem you may encounter is freelancers disappearing after you pay a down payment for your project. Some freelancers create many accounts on sites like odesk, elance, getacoder, rentacoder, getafreelancer so they stop responding to you and don’t refund your initial money.
So your money-saving plan can cost both money and time, and lost time is more expensive than lost money.
How to prevent this from happening, here are some simple reasons to choose a small web development company over a freelance web developer.
1. The company has a long-term plan, so the website development company is professional.
2. The company has extensive resources for web design, web development, quality testing and implementation so that your project is never delayed.
3. A company has a legal name, a legal office, so a web development company can sign a contract with you, a freelancer will never sign a contract or there is no point in signing a contract with a freelancer.
4. The website development company has a lot of backup resources, even if some developers or designers don’t show up, the company can replace them with other developers and your work will not be affected.
5. Web development companies make money from milestones, so your money and projects are safe.
6. The main point is communication. You can find someone who communicates well in a web development company because the manager is always the experienced man; he takes all responsibility for problems and payments.
Most importantly, it gives you peace of mind when you partner with a web development company that costs little extra but has many amenities as mentioned above.
