poniedziałek, 25 lipca 2011

Elance Critique

By Jon Kew


There are quite a few people in search of a good, honest Elance review, and no small wonder. The site provides the largest collection of freelancer and freelance contractors from around the globe in categories like writing, programming, graphic design, and administrative assistance. If you're in the marketplace for a contractor to help with the production of material for your next undertaking, it's important to know if Elance is suitable for you and your business (or not).

Elance helps businesses hire and administer in the cloud. For businesses looking to staff-up a team on an hourly or project basis, Elance offers instant access to qualified professionals who work online and provides the tools to hire, view work as it progresses and pay for results.

Elance for Buyers

As a buyer, If you are looking to jump-start a project, broaden your reach or just easily get things done, you will find that Elance is quicker and more cost-effective than job boards, staffing firms and traditional outsourcing. You name it and Elancers will deliver results, often with a flourish: from writing code, crafting a marketing program, designing your website, managing your day-to-day schedule and a thousand other projects.

The website has been based on feed-back from user experience of the buyer. This means you'll on no account spend a dime on the website, other than to the providers you employ. Signing up is also very straightforward, taking only a few minutes and culminating in the posting of your maiden project.

Setting up a project requires minimal work, though I would recommend that you take a few minutes to review the options available for any given project. You want to be thorough in outlining your needs so you don't get inundated with bids from low quality contractors. This is, sadly, the one failing of a website like Elance (if not Elance in particular). Anybody can be an Elance subscriber if they pay their monthly service fee, and they can then tender for your project.

It then becomes up to you to work your way through the returns you receive and select the appropriate one that you will feel comfortable with. You will need to read samples, ask for interviews, and setup milestones that ensure you get the quality you're seeking.

The Providers

When it comes to finding a quality provider, most Elance review writers note that Elance has long been in the middle ground due to the sheer mass of providers here. But, the old maxim of "you get what you pay for" just about always come into play. If you wish for low cost, high quality work, it will be hard to find quality providers. Nonetheless, if you are interested in paying a bit more, the top level providers in any category are scored to help you track them down. They have ratings for each type of undertaking, total earnings, repeat clients, and an all-inclusive aggregated score that shows how well regarded they are by other buyers.

If you have skills and talent and are seeking independent work on-line, Elance offers access to qualified clients, a virtual place of work and guaranteed pay for great work. To help make delivering great results easier for you, Elance offers a suite of tools to help make your work life as smooth as possible.

Workroom Tools

Early Elance review writers highlighted this as its main advantage over the competition (or unique selling point), since Elance was one of the first services to provide escrow services and they work very well. Providers pay the escrow fees out of their earnings and in most cases, it is practically instant (once your payment source is confirmed). The workroom has undergone recent upgrades to provide the same hour tracking and screenshot tools as 'Odesk', although they do still fall behind on a couple of things, i.e. mobile apps and desktop tracking offered by 'Odesk'.

Also, Elance's backend can be a bit puzzling with a slew of seemingly overlapping options for payment and invoicing. This is as a result of their frequent upgrading and testing. Every month or two you can expect a change to the way Elance operates, sometimes in small ways and sometimes with a full overhaul which leaves you confused and grasping for options.

The Bottom Line

As any good Elance review will tell you, there are both good and bad points to make for the use of Elance as your outsourcing tool of choice. On one side, Elance has more providers and a greater network of projects than any other site in its class. As a buyer, you pay no fees and can have access to providers almost instantly from around the globe. Nonetheless, the program itself can be dizzying at times and the calibre of the providers is often hard to verify, and there is no way to guarantee where the bids are coming from, a major problem in certain categories, like Writing and Translation.

In summary, Elance is a useful tool that can help you shrink your work load significantly. Don't expect it to do all the heavy lifting for you, however. Interview your prospects, study their work, and freely use the feedback tools to land solid contractors that you can count on for future projects.




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