So now you know what to look for in a coder--but a much greater problem for many people is the problem of where to find the perfect coder for your project. It isn't simply a matter of posting an advertisement in a local classified section and waiting for responses--that might get you some potential candidates, but it removes one of your best tools for assessing the suitability of a coder: the portfolio.
One useful method is to post your project on freelancing programming sites, one of the most prominent of which is rentacoder.com. Rentacoder.com allows software buyers--such as yourself--to post details of your project on their directory of projects, along with some idea as to the rate you're willing to offer. Coders can then bid on your project, giving you portfolio examples, any certifications they may have, and their ideal rate for the work. Once you've checked out what they can do, you can approve their bid, place your payment in escrow, and just wait for the coding work to be done. As soon as the coder sends you the work (and as soon as you approve it), the money is released to the coder, and you can both go on your ways--your coder with his cash and experience, and you with your functioning direct response website.
There are a number of advantages to this method. Most importantly, there's the wide talent pool from which to choose--just as putting your business on the Internet gives your product a much wider potential audience than you could achieve through traditional channels, looking for contract employees (like coders) over the Internet gives you a much wider selection and a much greater chance of finding someone with the perfect skills for your job. Additionally, services like rentacoder.com greatly simplify the process of interviewing potential coders and determining prices: most of the things that you need to know about a coder (namely, their skills and their price) is available at the rental site, just waiting for you to sort through the options and make your decision.
But it's important to keep in mind some of the disadvantages to services like rentacoder.com as well. For one, it's very difficult to get a good sense about a potential coder's personality from their rentacoder.com profile or even their skills set. Again, this isn't a problem for short-term work, but as we've discussed, the ideal relationship with a coder is a long-term relationship. Not only does rentacoder.com make it more difficult to create such a relationship by masking coder personalities, but it also makes it more complicated to hire a coder on an ongoing basis. Rentacoder.com only allows you to bid on a coder for a single project--e.g. a single website--with no simple provision for providing ongoing work.
Fortunately, these obstacles aren't insurmountable--it just requires more work on your part in order to build and nurture a relationship with your coder. Rentacoder.com automatically releases personal details like phone number and email address for all projects above $500, allowing you to contact your coder directly--once the project is in motion, unfortunately. Before the hiring process--or if your design work costs less than $500, which it shouldn't (see below)--you can post messages to your coder on the rentacoder.com message boards or chat rooms, which is the ideal way to contact them--and there's nothing that says you can't ask for a phone number or email address in such communications to help you make the informed decision before renting a coder.
Are there other options? Of course--there's always classified advertising (on or offline), there are personal references from other business contacts, there's the possibility of emailing the designers of high-profile sites that you've seen and liked, and there's the ubiquitous Craigslist posting. But as long as you're willing to put in the effort to build a personal relationship with your coder (and to assess their personality and skills before hiring), sites like rentacoder.com simply offer too much variety and too much talent to ignore altogether.
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Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.
1 comment:
New resource on the subject: Outsourcing Through Rentacoder
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