I Made The Internet

Over the past 2 years I have had two projects freelanced out, one to India and one to China.

Foreign freelancers are cheap, very cheap. Quote $2,000 for a Joomla based website, while American based companies were $15,000+.  The graphic design was pretty good, did not have any complaints, all free stock photography was used and the sites were all search engine optimized by default.

The areas where outsourcing work to a foreign country got bad is during the communication. India and China are both across the world from New York. The Indian company would only contact me in their afternoon hours, our time 1am-3am. I was at college during this so it was not too bad. The Chinese company had what seemed to be a night guy. He worked about 8am to 1pm our time, 8pm to 1am their time. At times I was talking to this person at 3am his time. Communication was mostly done through Skype. The Indian company would email me every few days with updates.

In both instances the project took double to triple the amount of time quoted, time was not an issue for us.

The time I spent with an American company was short lived mainly because of the time it took to get something done, and the price we were paying for it. They would charge a company $10,000 every 4 months for 10 hours of maintenance, and ongoing SEO. In my mind this was completely ludicrous for the size and purpose of the site. I first found out about this when I was going to add an “Our Friends” link to the main menu to designate an area for link swaps. (This was back when I thought reciprocal links meant something). To get this link and page added, our representative at the web development company had to submit a “ticket” to the developers and the time it would take would be quoted, then would need our final approval. A “ticket” took three days to be processed, and we were told it would take 8 working hours. Well, ok, whatever, it would be free.

We were emailed a few days later saying our project was done, it was not. The developers only added the link to the main pages, none of the subpages (all the pages were static, no backend). After about three weeks of calling this company back the business relationship between us was terminated. Its pretty sad that this company let this small problem get so bad to the point where we didn’t renew the contract. This company was making $30,000 a year to do practically NOTHING. The onsite SEO sucked and link building was none existent.

In my opinion I like the Chinese freelancers more because of the better communication.

All in all, if you have the time, freelance it out, (I know it hurts the economy) but from what I hear, American companies can do a great job, and sometimes will even write all the copy (text) for you on the site.