Tips on outsourcing website coding

Basically what is the outline of your requirement?

Hi,

I'm a developer.
What you need to do when you outsource is:
- Ask for his previous work, and ask how long each project took. That will help you to see the quality of his work, and if he's slow or fast.
- Setup a meeting on skype to talk about the project, so he can understand the concept, and can ask questions. Make sure he fully understand the project and how every part fit together.
- Create a document that will list all the requirements and the technical details and send it to him.
- If you're on a budget, ask for a flat fee. This flat fee will cover the specs you listed in your document, so make sure your document is accurate! If you are paying per hour or per day, you will have bad surprises, as the development usually takes longer than expected. Also, when developers are paid by the hour, they are tempted to slow down in order to invoice more.
Never pay more than 50% before the development start. If the development takes only 2 weeks, you shouldn't even have to send money in advance. Only pay once you have a working demo. If the development time is 4 weeks or more, you should pay the developer gradually. Everybody has bills to pay, and that helps to receive money progressively.
- Do not be too cheap. if a developer is asking less than $150/day, it's suspicious. that means he's either a beginner (lack of experience = more bugs and more security flaws), a part-time developer (= probably not experienced enough or not good enough to work full-time), or he's just a bad developer (good developer have a lot of recurring business, because the quality of their work is great => more clients = able to charge more)

When I outsource, I'm suspicious if the guy ask me less than $250/day.
I'm personally asking for $430/day.

For Coding: I think it really pays to know exactly what it is you are asking for. For me it has helped to know some coding so I can check the work. You can to validated the code so it's w3c complaint The W3C Markup Validation Service
and clean css style sheet The W3C CSS Validation Service
Some more information and resources Site Validation it's no fun to pay for a job to later discover it's a disaster.

Also don't expect designers to be coders or coders to be fancy designers anymore. You could get lucky though

Be clear and precise on what you want. I find it much less complicated to have a designer do the design work and then, Code around the design (like a layerd psd file) Or Code around the design depends on your project. Best Luck!

I'm a programmer as well, and everyone here has already posted some excellent and worthwhile advice.

I cannot over-emphasize 26medias' "do not go cheap" statement. More times than I care to remember, I've come across previous work that was shoddy, and nearly unusable. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that you have to pay $40,000 for your site.

If this is a project for the long-term, ensure that proper coding standards are kept, including a very well documented and commented. It doesn't have to be a novel, but enough that another coder/programmer (in the event you need to add/amend to the code) can quickly & easily understand the original programmer's intentions.

As far as what you want accomplished, you should have a detailed itemized description of what you're asking for. That way the programmer can be more precise with their bid.

And one last word on freelance bidding sites. Coders outside the US (primarily E. Europe & Asia) often bid extremely low on project. Then when you get into the meat and potatoes of it, after going back and forth for a couple days to as much as a few weeks, they stall and ask for more money.

I've actually tried to bid out projects that we're small $200 projects that I needed to have outsourced because my plate was full, only to have this happen more than a handful of times.

Hope that helps...

Thank you guys for all the info! Basically the website I am planning to outsource is going to be offering services (just plain text) and it is going to be in minimalist style. I believe 2-3 pages is going to be plenty. I want something similar to this - inspira-ukdotcom/
How much do you reckon this should cost?