Hiring a Foreign Freelancer? I don't recommend it.

We've had prospects turned clients that began their web design and development journey by hiring a freelancer rather than a professional development firm, and I can tell you that even though they become clients and we win in the long run, it still sucks to see clients go through horror experiences and lose so much time and money.

Companies generally do this because they believe they could save money by merely hiring a freelancer and get a similar product to that of a professional web development firm.

Unfortunately, however, this is almost never the case. Of course, it is always possible that hired freelancer could produce a wonderful product, but this is extremely unlikely.

This article mainly discusses the disadvantages of hiring a foreign freelancer, but it also goes into why hiring a development firm would be a much wiser move than hiring any freelancer. Here’s why:

Barriers

Before hiring an overseas freelancer, it is important to consider all types of social barriers you will encounter. These barriers will cost you a fair bit of time, and, since time is money, this is very important to consider.

Here are some of those said barriers. These barriers can result in much time being wasted on both ends and a constant lack of clarity between both parties:

• Huge time difference between you and the freelancer whom you are hiring. If you are each half way around the world from each other, it would be difficult to discuss your project, as one of you would always be asleep while the other is awake.
• Language and dialect differences and difficulties between you and the freelancer.
• Large amounts of time wasted, spent attempting to explain general cultural principles that will be behind your site.
• Trust between both parties is difficult to obtain in the first place. It’s harder when the other party is across the ocean and can easily simply take your money and not be accountable or criminally liable.

Experience and Capability

While many freelancers are competent enough, no single freelancer’s experience in the field can compare to the accumulated, collective experience of a development team. For example, if a single freelancer has been working in his respective field for a full decade, he only has ten years of experience.

However, even if a web development company has a mere five, and each individual has been working in the field for five years (we have thirty team members), your project would have twenty-five years of accumulated and collective experience behind it.

Another anecdote demonstrating the massive gain of experience you get when hiring a web development firm is that even if you hire a team of three members: a designer with four years, a developer with five years, and a project manager with three years – there are already a whopping twelve years of experience working on the project at hand. Keep in mind that this just takes into account the core team, not even their respective team support groups.

Many people believe that their front-end site (or the user interface) is the only part of a site that makes it successful. Many freelancers can make a site that looks very appealing. Unfortunately, what looks good isn’t always what is good. The part of a site that makes it particularly successful is not the aesthetics, but rather the back-end of the site, which is extendable, powerful, and secure. Without such a backend, your site will be left vulnerable, slow, and without value.

You will need those many years of experience of a development firm in order to turn a website you pay for into something that will eventually turn into money for you. Since most freelancers finish your project and then never converse with you again, it is far from likely that any freelancer could possibly give you any site with a good return on investment.

Spread Thinly

When paying for a website to be created, you are buying the lifeline of your business. When hiring a freelancer, you are paying one person to cover every single aspect of your website. When hiring a development team, however, you are paying a group of people, each person with a certain specialty in web design, to cover your site from top to bottom. This will be much more customized and well-done.

It is better that more time be spent developing special talents within web design than to spread one’s self thin doing every part of the web design process without learning the intricacies of each.

In order to get both an visually appealing website and a robust way to manage it, you will need to have your website created by:

• A designer whose only function on the team is to research web design practices and ensures that his designs are the highest quality they can possibly be.
• A developer whose only function on the team is to research secure coding practices and who can code well using stable and extendable techniques.
• A project manager who is easy to talk to and who can accurately convey your desires for your site and ensure that what you request is done.
• A team support base that the team can bounce ideas off before putting into practice in order to get a second opinion and further critiquing of their work before outputting the final product.

Notice: The intention of this article is not to diminish the credibility of any freelancers, as there are lots of great freelancers out there – the sole purpose of this article is to demonstrate that a professional company will output a more polished product than an individual possibly could.

The bottom line is that, since you are paying to have a website designed, it should be the best it can be. As a matter of fact, it can be worse to pay too little!

Farin Innovations is a web design and development company located in Miami, Florida, that is also highly successful in the areas of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and social media strategies. You can rest assured that you will receive a stable and beautiful product from us. Please do not hesitate to give us a call or send us a message to get your consultation today!