I'm talking a website developer who insists on keeping the source code their own and says they have worked many years to perfect it (so I guess I'm not getting a completely unique site). Is this a big red flag?

Also, is it necessary for a website developer to know your budget before giving you a quote? I always feel put off by this because I feel like their estimate of how much the site costs shouldn't rely on on how much I have to spend (if I'm able to give them enough details). However, pretty much every web developer I've talked to asks me for my budget. They can probably tell I'm a fish.

Thanks vodka!

@Markuis, asking for budget is a smart way to get the most out of you. I'd contact them back with a detailed spec of what you want and wait for a quote. If you send them your budget they will come up with a spec for you. So make a detailed spec (I can't tell you how important this is for a web developer to see) and ask for a quote to complete that spec.

Source code is a bit unusual, what source code is he talking about exactly? I'm guessing he's written a CMS and he's referring to the dynamic stuff like PHP, but isn't PHP uncompiled which means you have access to it anyway?

Either way, if they don't want you looking at the source it means you are stuck with them if you need a change. Which means I'm not going to hire them.

One important thing to note (only found this out recently) is that unless you explicitly specify otherwise the code they do for you they own the copyright on. This isn't really an issue 99% of the time but something to keep in mind. (Also why I asked about Odesk).

Whoever puts out the first real number in a negotiation is at a disadvantage, as the hiring company I would force them to make a quote as a requirement. Who owns code is a really weird question it would be awesome if we knew about it. I mean good programmers are constantly building their repertoire of code that they use in future projects no? That's what makes them good and fast I thought.

I only found this out recentlyish so take this with a grain of salt, but unless you specifically sign over the rights to the creative work under a "Work for hire agreement" or something similar the copyright of the work remains with the author. The author has merely granted you a license to use the work. This is important for contract work but in actual employment I think the law states the employer owns the rights.

The scope of what can be done with the work you have a license for is rarely defined, for example it might cause complications if you are planning on selling your website/business. I've never heard of disputes around this sort of thing but theoretically I think it's possible?

Also again I'm under the assumption than unless you explicitly have an agreement, you can't modify the work. I learnt this a semi-hard way when I wanted to modify/cut-up/relocate some graphic design I bought and was told I was not allowed even though I purchased under the assumption I could.

Saw an interesting episode of Dragons Den which I've just remembered, one of the Dragons asked these two people who had a website who owns the website code. They said they do and the Dragon asked to see proof which they couldn't provide as they didn't have any, and the Dragon said that they don't own the copyright to the website then. Not the greatest case study but shows these sorts of asset/copyright management considerations are important if you're looking to start a business up and plan on seeking investment/exit.

Thanks a lot Gullanian,

It's funny, the 2 developers who didn't ask for a budget quoted me at about 1/4 the price of the 5 or so others who did ask for a budget (their quotes were all close to the ceiling of my budget).

I don't really understand their thought process because even if I'm willing to spend up to my budget, they should expect competition from other developers (I even directly said that I'm considering other offers) and their best strategy is definitely not to just quote as high as my budget.

I never even thought about asking someone for their budget up front. I usually just ask what they have in mind, and give them an estimate of how much time it will take me to do something and tell them I charge X$/hr. I've never gone over my time estimated without them wanting to add/change something and that's not a big deal once I explain that wasn't a part of their original request.

Web Developers are the 'Mechanics' of the internet. Just like if you go to a car workshop needing to get some work done and you don't have sufficient knowledge in automobiles they are going to fleece you. Seeing as most people who hire developers are inexperienced they will take you for an absolute ride (Pardon the pun). Its not like web design where you can instantly see things you dont like either, they can bang together some POS code, get the money and run. I have lost $5,000 to shotty developers who were the 'industry leading' developers in my city.

Make them assign ALL work to you (This includes code, IP created previously, during or after your agreement), and DO NOT enter into ANY agreement or business project with them if they won't do this. This IS a red flag so avoid it. You are probably not building anything that hasn't been done before, otherwise you'd have an in house team, a CTO and a lot of capital, so this means your project can be done by anyone who's good.

Just go somewhere else and find someone to build your project. By them not giving you the code, they virtually own your site regardless of payment and worse yet, they probably want to lock you in so that anything you do has to go through them, further fleecing you. Im not going to tell you not to use them, ok that's a lie, don't use them. Make them sign a 'Copyright assignment deed' or talk to a lawyer about this, if you value your business because this will come back to bite you in the ass.

Also, they will always quote you at the top of your price range so low ball it and if they say it can't be done for that then 'ask the minimum amount it can be done for' then allow your self a 30% variance in price (because your product will start to define itself more as you build it and you'll want to make changes) and for time (for delays, trust me, nothing runs on time)
I learnt this the hard way.

This probably works okay for them. The EV of naming a price very close to your ceiling and getting your business 50% of the time would be higher than quoting half your budget and getting your business 90% of the time or whatever.

There are probably a lot of people who just get quotes from 2 or 3 places, and if all those places do this same thing, it'll work fine. And they also might just assume "well if he's SAYING 2k, his actual budget is probably 4k, so when we quote 1800 he'll be happy enough".

Yeah I have to agree here with HowardGrind and to take it a step further I really feel like you need to have someone who understands coding basics managing the project before your outsource someone to do it. It is just really inefficient to outsource when you have zero clue what's going on, you are basically going to overpay something like 5x-10x a huge % of the time and/or it probably won't get done right.

Basically two outsourcing situations that work well IME:
-You only have one concrete task to do (that is not essential to your business) and no coding experience in management. Pay a huge premium and get someone really great who handles every aspect and gets it done right.
-Someone in management has some amount of experience coding experience. You pay on a sliding scale based on how well they can project manage.

If you are extremely fortunate you might catch a rockstar coder building a portfolio but he's going to be worth twice as much as you are paying him in 6 months most likely so it's not like you can bank on that anyways.

Outsourcing works best for individuals who can do all the work themselves (or very close to it.) They know exactly what is needed, how it should look, and can review the work properly.

Non-tech people trying to oursource coding work are going to have many problems. Usually they won't even know they have a problem. That's not even talking about the prices.

Anyone used BuySellAds? Experimenting with it now. My only query is some websites that claim for example 1.5m impressions seem to have lest backlinks, lower alexa rank than our site. Suspiciously low FB followers and high Twitter followers (75x more twitter followers than FB fans). Compete.com shows it having less visits than we do as well.

I am sceptical of some of the sites on there and am sticking to the ones I know for now. Anyone have similar thoughts?

You can Google and find reports of people accusing their sites of being bot spammed, which lines up with your research.

I'm pretty sure they can tie in Google Analytics with their service and verify traffic, would love it if they did this, it's a shame some sites are scammy as buysellads seems like a great service and website.

From here: http://www.imreportcard.com/services/buy-sell-ads

That sounds like some guy running a scam, if you make a claim and sell advertising on that I expect that claim to be backed up if required to by whoever is managing everything, it seems perfectly reasonable. Not giving readonly access is a big flag for me saying not to trust that particular site owner.

A friend of mine has had success to them around Christmas (he sells things that are good gifts), but I think he focuses on known sites that have certain similarities to his site. From my brief looks around buysellads I would not doubt at all that there's a decent amount of shady stuff here and there.

edit(didn't see the previous replies before I posted this)

Yeah, I don't understand at ALL why he would so strongly against giving them read-only access, that's just dumb. He might be posting that in the same way cheaters who get their accts locked on PS always post in the Internet forum to try and drum up support (in vain).

Um, BSA should make it a requirement to give Analytics access ahead of time to verify. And you really can't see why people don't want their Analytics stats handed out? You can see where ALL of the traffic comes from and replicate.

I doubt some guy running a scam would go to the trouble to trash them after being caught. The post seemed genuine. I wouldn't want to grant them access to my GA if it wasn't a requirement.

I think in a scammy market like advertising where all things shady go on, having BSA require analytics access for verification is a good strategy for their business. They have lost me as a long term customer because it's time consuming to filter out all the scams.

I can't see why people would object to analytics being handed out if they are providing advertising, BSA doesn't really have an interest in finding out where a small 20k visitor site is getting their traffic from. Do you think they would bother replicating for a small 20k visitor site?

I agree, but if that's not part of the agreement, they shouldn't strong arm someone into showing their Analytics.


Probably not, but that's irrelevant. If the owner feels like they might and doesn't want to expose something like that, it's his right. I think it's lame on BSA's part.

Not trying to start a debate. Just mentioned it because you brought up GA.

The advertiser can disagree with the decision, and they can deny the request to show the analytics which is fine but they would have also agreed to the BSA t&c which would probably state they can freeze their account/funds if something is suspicious (I haven't read it or seen it but I'm sure they've covered themselves in this way). So a complaint about the consequences of their decision to not cooperate shouldn't mean much I think

It's a shame BSA is so full of questionable advertisers, I've been spending a few hours today going through it and in terms of semi relevant places that I can trust and advertise on that have >100k impressions/m there's about 2 sites, and around 20 or so that I just can't trust.

The best advertising deals we've got hands down have been ones where we approached the sites directly so far, best hit rate, conversion rate and you get a good relationship with a relevant contact.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sopa-strike/

Anyone with a WP site, please install this plugin to black it out for a full 24 hours on the 18th. It just redirects the user to the official SOPA strike page.

Added.

Interesting new ranking metric from Google:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...provement.html

I like it, seems like a smart move

IME that has already been rolled out with Panda to some degree, pretty typical Google roll out change in the dark to test then release it publicly once it's a success.