Hiring Online Freelancers - Caveat Emptor

[Tabor Tollefson]

This forum is all about learning from other's mistakes. Here's mine:

I decided to create a website for leads. There are a lot of sites out there that help you to build your own site but I'm busy as all of us are and decided that it was more stress for me to try to do it myself then to pay someone to do it for me. After researching all the available resources, I went to upwork.com and posted my job. I waded through the responses and thought I had found the perfect match. 

Two weeks later and I there was little communication other than a couple of screenshots of the ongoing design and excuses as to why it was not progressing. I asked if I would need to upload it to my hosting site or if he was planning to do that as well. His response was that I would need to convert his work to HTML/CSS first. Turns out, what he was working on was a PHOTOSHOP design of a website, not an actual website. He blamed the situation on me stating that "I had asked for the wrong thing" and he was willing to set up the web site but it would require me to pay him more than twice what I had already paid. I contacted Upwork and was told that since I hired on an hourly contract, there was nothing they could do.

Lessons learned:

• Anytime you hire a freelancer, be extremely explicit as to what you need and what you expect the finished job to look like.
• Do not hire based on an hourly contract, hire based on the job. If the job isn't done correctly, then you have more recourse to withhold payment. 
• Make them put into writing exactly what they will be delivering to you.

Fortunately, this lesson only cost me a couple hundred bucks. That's a cheap lesson in this industry!