Yes they often do a good job but you need to be very specific about what you want. And I mean VERY specific.

thanks CWar,

If you can, please answer my other question regarding how to estimate hours or cost of outsourcing.
Thanks.

Going to save you a lot of trouble here cos you appear to be from Brisbane like me.

They are going to say 'we can't tell you without knowing more about your project', youre going to reply with 'well I need to protect the idea and I can't go into much detail, because I don't want anyone stealing the idea', they are going to tell you 'ideas are worthless, execution is everything', you're not going to understand how much of an absolute truth that is until you actually start your project.

I say this with all due respect.

By 'VERY' he virtually means you tell them exactly how to do it and what to do. Anything less is detined for a lot of heartache and lost time and money.

Well let's say I know exactly what I need done and I'm not afraid of letting them in on my 'secret'. How do I know how much to budget for coding, design etc etc..

or do I get a feel for it along the way e.g. get them to do a small task first to see how long it took / how much $ it cost.

Also, should I be paying hourly or set an agreed price per project?

Thanks

Price per project seems to be most effective IMO if they will do it. The best reference I have is someone did about a months worth of work for $500. Most projects that long usually cost $500-$1000. Small piece of code should be pretty cheap.

If the only competitive advantage you have is launching 2 weeks before anyone else, your idea sucks anyway and it will be all about execution. Think about it - once your site launches - everyone who sees it can potentially hire someone from odesk or program an exact copy themselves.

With Indian/etc guys, you have to be specific to the 'T'. They have no common sense. With E. Europeans, it's a lot better - though they are more expensive. That's my experience.

And obviously, the best way to see if someone does work acceptable to your needs is to test them out with a smaller project. That's part of doing business. Lots of these guys work for spam/similar operators who don't need quality and even the junkiest articles/etc get rated highly as long as they are cheap and meet some other specific criteria. Don't go just by the rating.

If I'm outsourcing the work, how much do you think a site like grubhub would cost to build? What's the best platform to build it on?

Any site that does traffic estimates that aren't horrible? I see this http://www.mydnstats.com/ but am highly suspicious of some of the stuff that comes out.

i use compete.com

Google ad planner.

Sweet thanks.

In google analytics, I see visitors with avg time spent on site is 0:00. What does that mean? How was the page loaded without one second spent on the site?

GA tracks session times with cookies so one of several things is occurring. Either the cookie is not being set (users can block cookies, incognito modes and such) and maybe GA tracks this as 0:00 time or perhaps visits < 0.5 seconds AFTER the cookie (could be a 1+ seconds if your site is slow) is set counts are rounded down or possibly both.

GA tracks time in a weird way - basically, if someone comes to your site and visits only one page, GA will always show that as having spent 0:00 time on the site. Clicky tracks time in a more intuitive way I've found.

if i use ODesk to find a guy to polish up my WordPress homepage with some HTML/CSS stuff, do I just give him my WP password? i mean is that safe? i don't know how these things work. i ideally i want to give someone $50 to $100 to fix it up and then hopefully be done with him.

designing my WP homepage has taken me way more time than i imagined because i have to research every tiny little html/css piece of code to make the tiniest changes and every time there is a snag, which means more googling. so for right now i think i'm better off having someone spend 5-10 hours polishing up my homepage while i play poker rather than me spending 50-100 hours on learning/doing the coding. i have respect for you guys that are good at this stuff. definitely not intuitive for a newbie.

In the WP-admin under users create a separate account user with diff login and password. After the job is over, change/delete the account.

An ideal situation is to setup a separate development environment and apply it yourself. I might just be paranoid but I don't hand away the keys of the kingdom to cheap OD guys. Not always practical depending on your level of savvy and the scale of the project but that's ideal. For small html/css tweaks he can literally take the source code and hand you the changes.

This is a great program to use for that shows you what parts of the files were changed so you can manually accept each one to ensure nothing malicious.
http://www.araxis.com/merge/

Being able to edit the source files pretty much gives you access to everything and any designer is not going to want to work off the WP code editor.

that's a good point. i can send him url of my site and tell him what i want done to homepage, and then he can just email me the code to place in the WP editor. so obvious i don't why i didn't think of that. one day i'll look back at my posts and laugh.

So I mentioned on this site before that I'm headed into Internet Marketing.

I currently have a client that my team; graphic designer, web developer, link builder and myself (I'm kind of a Marketing nerd) are going to be working for.

The project is for a concrete ish company that has a pretty meh website. I plan to turn that around for them and then go on a proper link building campaign for them so they out rank their competitors. I think I asked for below market rate, but its for a friend and Id like to get my foor in the door.

Will post the link when I'm finished, but hopefully around january I could do 2-4 projects like these and pretty much double what im charging.

american concrete washouts . com is the current site, so you can see there is alot to be done

Just some questions as I'm interested in what you do.

How did you put together your 'team'? are they local or outsourced? do you have an office for this?

How much money is in this? Is it a lot of work or is it quite straight forward? Do you just target companies with subpar websites and flip them?

This. Also make sure you have a backup of the site before you give him the account and password.

He's going to need the PHP source code. PHP is a server side scripting language and what WordPress is written in. A very simplistic and not totally correct way to look at what goes on is that when the server gets a request for a page, it turns the PHP into HTML and then sends the HTML file. This is why just giving him the URL isn't going to work.

If this isn't clear enough please let everyone know and I'm sure you'll get better answers.

Depending on the scope of the changes its not always necessary to have the PHP. It certainly could be ported over if you wanted to deny access to the PHP. Another nice way to do it is take the themes files located in your wordpress directory /wp-content/themes/theme-name give him the theme and have him work on it on his own WP installation and give the theme back.