Intro­duc­tion

Any­one that knows me knows that I'm not a big fan of out­sourc­ing to imbal­anced economies. I think it takes away high-tech jobs when the play­ing field isn't level — and with the new "global" econ­omy, the bal­ance is far from being fair. I feel that there needs to be some throt­tling to the drain ver­sus let­ting the flood gates wide open. But see­ing that it is the way that it is, I decided to put my money where my mouth is.

For your infor­ma­tion, this test is con­ducted on my own project and com­ing out of my own pocket. I am not tak­ing any of my client's work and send­ing it over­seas. The risk and bur­den is com­pletely on me.

For a few years now, I've con­sid­ered tak­ing my main web­site, LunarStu­dio and have it con­verted over to a Word­Press site. LunarStu­dio actu­ally pre­dates most blogging/content man­age­ment sys­tems. It's one of the first sites that was per­fectly cen­tered with­out the use of Flash — I know it was an unusual design at the time because I had to design it myself with no code to ref­er­ence. Over the years, it has climbed high up on the search engine rank­ings and the for­mat has been copied repeat­edly. I've been hes­i­tant to redesign the site because it is ranked so highly. In the­ory, the new Word­Press site would like iden­ti­cal to the way it cur­rently looks. I'd ben­e­fit from the Word­Press con­ver­sion due to eas­ier access to addi­tional plu­g­ins such as met­rics, forms, etc. The biggest ben­e­fit would be in my abil­ity to update the web­site with newer work. As of now, it's a labor-intensive man­ual process of resiz­ing my images to sev­eral sizes, cre­at­ing two sep­a­rate thumb­nails, water­mark­ing, copy­ing code, past­ing, enter­ing key­words, link­ing to other images, sav­ing, then upload­ing. To be frank, it's a royal pain in the ass. I would rather be able to just sim­ply upload and not have to think about it.

The Sce­nario

Now, I could code the new tem­plate myself, but it would prob­a­bly take a few days in order to do things right. There's a lot of things which hap­pen "under the hood" since it is mostly gallery and lit­tle text. This would have to be pre­served. Also, I'm not too famil­iar with Word­Press gal­leries and how that whole struc­ture works. I'm sure I could fig­ure it out, but that would take some addi­tional time.

A few days ago, I started look­ing online for any easy sug­ges­tions as to how to con­vert a site over to Word­Press as well as some pre-existing gal­leries for ref­er­ence. At the top of the results were some links from a web­site called freelancer.com. I saw that another per­son had asked if any­one could per­form a con­ver­sion for him, and I noted that the rates were extremely low. Peo­ple were bid­ding in the $50-$200 range.One "free­lancer" had over 150 10-star rat­ings and was will­ing to do this guy's work for $75. I couldn't help but think, "glad I'm not in web­site design…" The fact is that no one in the United States can com­pete with rates that low for a few days worth of work.

I couldn't help but think, "well I can waste three days of my time or make it some­body else's prob­lem." I've had a rather busy month of work and sim­ply needed a break.

Now, I don't feel bad about giv­ing some­body that job over­seas. The last I checked, the aver­age salary pre-global eco­nomic melt­down in India was $3.50/hour US. Mul­ti­ply that by eight hours and that gives you $28/day or $84 for three days. Keep in mind that a loaf of bread over there prob­a­bly costs 15 cents com­pared to $2.50 here. In some other coun­tries, $100 is more than some peo­ple make in entire month. My point is that money is rel­a­tive to the cost of liv­ing depend­ing on where you live. They may be doing pretty well for them­selves all things considered.

So I signed up for freelancer.com and decided to give it a test. I added $150 to the account and posted the job. It read:

Descrip­tion

Hi. I need parts of my sta­tic web­site, www.lunarstudio.com con­verted over to a Word­Press tem­plate. I know Word­Press fairly well, but I do not have the time to do this myself.

The pages which needed to become a tem­plate are the following:

ナイキの労働者はどのくらいのお金を支払わない

You can prob­a­bly use Flexi Pages Wid­get (unless you have a bet­ter sug­ges­tion) for the left-side Navbar, even a basic online tem­plate cre­ator for the over­all page struc­ture, and a gallery plu­gin for the gallery page. Light­box Plus is to be used for the lightbox.

I'd like it to be sim­ple to use, clean, and retain all of my under­ly­ing SEO struc­ture. I should be able to eas­ily reuse these pages and insert my own infor­ma­tion later. SEO is important!

Thank you and good luck bidding!

–Charles

Enter The Free­lancer — 1st Day

I imme­di­ately received a reply from an indi­vid­ual in Pak­istan regard­ing my project. He had close to 65 10-star rat­ings and the reviews were noth­ing short of stel­lar. I fig­ured, "what could pos­si­bly go wrong, espe­cially for that kind of money?" I con­firmed him and he added me to messenger.

Within the first few min­utes of us con­nect­ing, I was bar­raged with a two hour ques­tion and answer session.

I told him in the very begin­ning that it was fairly sim­ple — "take web­site. Make web­site WordPress."

But for what­ever rea­son, that sim­ple con­cept seemed to get lost in translation.I won­dered why he even took the job as I thought I was pretty clear in the job description.

Ques­tions aside, I was anx­ious to get mov­ing along on this. I set up a dummy web­site with a Word­Press install that he could work on. I gave him author sta­tus, an email address, and FTP access.

On top of all that, he sud­denly insisted on hav­ing access to the data­base which made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Now, if you know Word­Press, there's absolutely no rea­son why you need access to the data­base unless you are cod­ing a plu­gin by hand. I wasn't ask­ing him to do that. I fig­ured, "well, maybe he knows some­thing that I don't."

So while I'm set­ting up all his access rights, he keeps on writ­ing — ask­ing me if I had things set up for him yet. Now he's start­ing to get on my nerves.

Then he asks, "can you send me the money now?"

I replied, "what?!?"

"This is our first time work­ing — I want to make sure you will pay."

"Okay, let me check. Okay, I have it. I'm going to bed now. Talk to you tomor­row — I look for­ward to work­ing with you."

For $140 and con­sid­er­ing that he had all those rat­ings, I didn't want to sit there and argue with him. He already killed enough time, so I looked into freelancer.com a lit­tle closer and noticed that there was an escrow option.

I asked, "are you fine with me putting it into escrow?"

"Yes, that's fine. Did you send me that information?"

"Yes I sent the access infor­ma­tion to your email."

And he hops offline.

Exit The Free­lancer — 2nd Day

On the sec­ond day, I wake up, pour myself a cup of cof­fee, and hop on my com­puter to check emails. My com­puter auto­mat­i­cally logs me on to messenger.

My new Pak­istani friend starts to write immediately.

"Charles, I mis­quoted you. This is a lot more work than I expected."

"If you can, per­haps you can put more money in my account. Of course this is not a requirement."

A sink­ing feel­ing starts to come about.

I answer with silence and now I'm start­ing to get a lit­tle peeved.

A few min­utes later he writes again, "I need access to your main lunarstu­dio website."

Now I'm begin­ning to real­ize this guy is sim­ply incom­pe­tent. I write back, "what?!? Why the heck do you need that? Just open up a browser, right-click and save as. No, you're not get­ting access to my main web­site. No one does."

"Okay okay okay."

A cou­ple of min­utes later, he writes — "Okay — check your word­press web­site. I have com­pleted a page."

I'm think­ing, well he's fast. I hop onto the blog which I set up for him to work on and it's the default Word­Press instal­la­tion theme. The only thing he changed was to stick one of my pic­tures into the body. So I'm start­ing to think, well it's prob­a­bly a browser cache issue. So I start clean­ing out my cache but noth­ing is chang­ing. So I write him:

"It doesn't look any­thing like my website!"

"Oh Charles, you told me not to worry about design."

"I said, the design has already been cre­ated by me — all you needed to do is copy it…"

So I hop back on Freelancer.com and now I'm dead set on can­cel­ing this moron. I notice that the money I put into escrow has dis­ap­peared. Mean­while, I'm try­ing to fig­ure out how and where the can­cel but­ton is.

He writes, "are you there?"

"Yeah — I'm here. I'm try­ing to fig­ure out how to can­cel you."

"Okay okay okay. That is fine."

"Where the hell is my money by the way? You took it out?!?"

"Yes but I can refund you right away. It's done."

On to Round Two

For­tu­nately, he did man­age to refund me. While I haven't posted all of our chat, I think he got the hint that I wasn't going to play games with him. If he didn't, I was going to trash his reviews. So the money is back in the account and I fig­ured I'd give it another shot — this time I was going to care­fully look through people's port­fo­lios and wait a few days before select­ing someone.

Judg­ing by my first day's expe­ri­ence, work­ing with this guy has been noth­ing short of a night­mare. Sure, he speaks some eng­lish. I can't imag­ine work­ing with some­one that knows half as much. I don't how much of it was actu­ally mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion, how much of it was stu­pid­ity, and how much of it was him try­ing to scam. Ask­ing for access to my data­base — that still has me puz­zled. I did lock him into one con­tainer but as soon as I can­celed, I removed all of his per­mis­sions. Was he try­ing to hijack my web­site to hold it ran­som or did he sim­ply get in over his head? I just don't see how this guy could have 65 10-star ratings.