Elance.com is a meeting place for professional service providers and prospective customers. The service provide a complete set of tools allowing you to post a job, seek bids for the work, administer the project, and securely make payment.
Recently, we had the opportunity to use Elance.com to have a publication designed for our firm. We had a 6000 word e-book written. The book was a Microsoft Word document and we wanted to have it converted to a PDF with an appealing design.
We posted the project on the Elance.com and within two days had nearly 15 bids. We reviewed the portfolios of each of the bidders and selected a graphic design firm doing most of their work in Mexico. Their bid for the project was $90. The same project would have cost us MUCH more here in Raleigh with the firm we sometimes use.
We e-mailed the Word document to the designers and about three days later received several questions about our specifications. The next day we received a first draft of the design and provided feedback. The designer made the changes we requested and sent us a final product a couple of days later.
We had previously placed the $90 in the Elance.com escrow account and upon receipt of the completed project we released the payment to the designer. It worked like a charm.
We’ve found professionals on Elance.com that have helped us with a number of IT projects, design projects, and some writing. All of the pricing has been very, very reasonable and we have been satisfied with the results each time.
The key, based on our experiences, to being successful with Elance.com is to carefully design your project and provide very specific details. Further, it’s imperative that you review the portfolio of the vendors you are considering.
I suggest you consider posting a simple project as an experiment and see what happens. If your results, and savings, are half as successful as the results we’ve achieved you’ll be very pleased.
The design project that I mentioned above was for the creation of our teen e-book on divorce. Click on the link and see if you think we got our money’s worth. Spend some time exploring the Elance.com site. One thing you might find interesting are the number of lawyers offering legal services via the site (some of them are doing family law).
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Lee Rosen has practiced family law for more than twenty years. With three offices, 