Do service marketplaces still work?

I have been a guru.com user for about 3 years now. I remember I used to bid on interesting projects a while ago. However, I don't do that anymore because it simply doesn't work for me. The question is, do services offered by guru.com, getafreelancer.com and other still work?

I have also been in a long term partnership with a company in UK. They outsource to my company all programming part of the project. However, our contract doesn't imply design and user interface services. The backend of 2 sites have been finished since last year. Since then, the designs have changed more than free times. In fact, the design was changed every time the designer has changed.

Imagine that my company is on hold, waiting for a designer that can do a good job so that the client is satisfied in order for us to finally finish the 10% of the project left to do. The problem is that too many people now bid on the same project. This is probably emphasized because of the financial crisis. Having less projects to work on people start bidding everywhere.

How do employers handle the huge amount of bids

This huge amount of bids received on each project isn't a huge headache for a big company, because they could have a certain amount of people just to review all these bids and choose the correct one. But what if you're a small company?

Chances are that inside a small company only one individual handles all this incoming bids, and has to choose the right contractor for the job. But how can one individual handle 30 or more bids under pressure. Projects have to be completed as soon as possible and unfortunately, the time allocated for choosing the right company or freelancer is under a week.

This is why using service marketplaces these days simply doesn't work if you're in a hurry. The amount of data that needs to be managed is simply overwealming. Nothing good can come out of this. This is probably why my client has been looking for a good designer for the past 6 months.

I also offer consulting services to this client, and a few days ago something funny happened. What intrigued me was the next thing. I got this email, and a new possible candidate said the following: "I didn't find too many highly programmed sites DIV based. In fact I haven't seen one yet...". I assume he doesn't live on Earth or he is a designer who uses internet just for IRC, messenger, and email. This is outrageous. Out of 30 or more bids, this was somewhere to the top of the list.

And he continues: "All sites are done in table based layouts.DIV based are supposed to be fast loading but creating table based sites can also be made fast loading using CSS extensively."

This is simply remarcable! Last time I switched a client from table based layouts the amount of traffic was reduced to 27% the following month. The loading times simply went to the roof. What kind of magic tables does this designer use?

His herracy continues: "A DIV based site is meant to be used as SEO friendly if its 100% validated. << What ?! >> but once you enter all those PHP codes and use it for any ecommerce sites or dating sites, its not possible for all those backend codes to be validated according to W3C standards.". Kid, W3C doesn't even deal with backend programming. Speak for yourself. If you cannot handle the job, if you're not skilled enough to do so, that is your sole problem.

Conclusion

This conversation I saw between a designer and an employer was the final drop, and led me to conclude that if you want to wisely spend your money, than you have to stop using service marketplaces for some time and look for companies that can offer quality around you. I suppose most companies would like to pay twice as much and have a project completed professionally in a timely manner, as opposed to wasting time (money) and money for outsourcing to someone who didn't even see a DIV based site in his life.

Published on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 11:39 am in articles.

About Bogdan Pop

Bogdan Pop is a young Romanian entrepreneur who runs WebRaptor. He is a web developer with awesome design skills, who enjoys writing about everyday's work and usability. He relaxes by taking photos every once in a while and by mixing french electronic music. Connect with him via Twitter.