Many startups seek their web presence through a simple website or an interactive web portal. To accomplish the web development task, they try to find the resources on the internet. They search for resources using keywords such as freelance web developer, freelance web development, or freelance web designers. Or they end up seeing some freelancer blog or land on freelance paradise websites like rentacoder, getacoder, getafreelancer, elance or odesk. Such sites have millions of cheap freelancers registered on them. You can submit a project and you can get up to 50-100 bids for your project in a day. This sounds exciting at first, but it’s just the beginning of the process. The problem starts now. Here are some difficulties that you will face in the initial stage.

1. You have overwhelming bids that make it difficult for you to choose.

2. Everyone tells you that they are the best, but very few tell the truth.

3. You may not find a single freelance web developer to meet all your needs, Mr. A meets 50% of the matching requirements and Mr. B and Mr. C each meet 25%, which It increases your problems.

So you finally selected someone with all your agreements on price and estimate, now you can see the second largest group of difficulties

1. Communication is a major problem, freelancer doesn’t answer emails on time and also doesn’t stay online all day because they have their full time jobs elsewhere (those jobs pay full time income)

2. Freelancer is a lonely person but web development project needs different skills like project requirement analysis, website mockup design, HTML conversion, PHP or .Net programming, QA testing and delivery. Normally not one person does everything. This invites problem #3

3. The freelancer either asks you to manage other resources or goes and looks for other freelancers to help them; which comes at a higher price. Thus, he loses a lot of time while his selected freelance web designer is busy finding help for him.

4. As I said in point #1, most of the freelancers have their full-time jobs, such jobs demand a lot of time and energy, so freelance web designers or developers work odd hours or just don’t work on some days. when they are busy with their full-time jobs. Such behavior causes further delays in the delivery of your project.

5. You may come up with various excuses for not turning in your projects, some common excuses are “I haven’t been well for a few days”, some emotional excuses like “My mother/father/daughter/wife is not well so I’m in the hospital” . Such excuses are emotional blackmail techniques that can make you believe that the freelancer is in trouble when in fact they are trying to buy more time.

6. Most freelance web developers are overworked due to their cheap hourly rates. Such an overload can make you suffer from the delay in your web development project. That further increases the frustration.

7. The main problem you may encounter is that the freelancer disappears after you have paid an advance for your project. Certain freelancers have many accounts created on websites such as odesk, elance, getacoder, rentacoder, getafreelancer, so they would stop responding to you and they would not return your initial money either.

So your savings plan can end up losing money and time, losing time is more expensive than losing money.

How can you avoid this? Here are simple reasons to select a small web development company over a freelance web developer.

1. The company has a long-term plan, so web development companies are professionals.

2. The company has plenty of resources for web design, web development, QA testing, and implementation so your project is never delayed.

3. The company has a legal name, law offices and web development companies can sign a contract with you, a freelancer never signs a contract or signing a contract with a freelancer is meaningless.

4. A web development company has a lot of supporting resources, so even if some developer or designer doesn’t show up, the company can replace them with other developers, their work is never affected.

5. A web development company charges money in milestones, so both your money and your project are safe.

6. The most important point is communication. You can get good communication with people in web development companies because the manager is always a very experienced person; he takes all responsibilities for problems and payments.

Above all, your peace of mind when working with web development companies, it comes at a small additional cost but with many conveniences as described above.

The choice is yours, select a freelance web designer and blast your web development project or select a web development company and run a successful web based business.