Elance.com: Outsourcing Site for Small Businesses

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We've received a number of compliments about our show logo.  And as nice as we think it looks, the story of how it came about is better. 

About a year ago we needed a logo designed for a program we were setting up.  We asked around and found a few graphic artists in the area, selecting one of them we felt comfortable with.  Although it worked out in the end, we spent way more than we really wanted to on it.  So much so that I don't even want to say just how much.  Months afterwards a friend of mine, personal productivity expert Peggy Duncan , showed me a site she had created by a web designer she found on Elance.com .  It looked great, took a little time, and most importantly met her strict budget requirements.

Elance.com is a site that allows you to put up for bid projects you need done, like programming work, website development, graphic designs and even writing copy for your site.  You can specify how much your willing to pay and the timeframes you need to work with and any other important information about what you need done.  Once you've filled in all your project info and submit it,  Elance announces it to a huge list of prospective contractors who will begin placing bids to win the project.  When I put our logo creation needs up on Elance, I had ten bidders within two hours.  Some of them had even put together mock ups based on the description I outlined. 

Elance facilitated the process of selecting a bid and setting up all project terms, including handling payments.  You can view comments and recommendations of all the companies bidding before you select one.  You can even ask questions of them before you decide.  And Elance set up a project workspace for me and the contractor to share files, track changes and send messages back and forth. So within a week, we had gone through a few iterations and come up with the logo currently on our site.  Most importantly, the design cost us about 10% of what our previous logo design work did. 

So if you are looking for web design work or other coding projects to be done without having to break the bank, check out Elance.com.

Posted by Brent Leary on Wed, Jan 17, 2007 @ 07:26 AM