peopleperhour.com is a kind of ‘ebay for projects’. Potential customers post projects they need doing and then interested suppliers will bid on them.

How we use it

I’ve been a user of peopleperhour.com (PPH) pretty much since it launched. I tend not to bid for much on it, but I do like keeping an eye on the sort of projects that get requested through it. It’s a great way of staying abreast of what sort of solutions businesses are after.

I also use it for sourcing freelancers for one off projects which require skills we don’t have within our full-time and part-time staff – but I limit that to marketing or copy related requirements. That’s not to say I wouldn’t source design and development through it, but I think to do so ups the level of risk to a project.

While I’ve only ever won a couple of projects through PPH, the contacts I’ve made through the network have generated quite a bit of business in the past. Our two biggest development projects in 2008 came from people who’d found my PPH profile in Google and then gone on to Google my name.

Although PPH aims to limit suppliers providing contact details to providers in advance of a deal being made I think in reality it does (or at least has done in the past) quite a poor job of monitoring this – probably because to clamp down on this is a really hard issue to find a scalable solution to. When they are unable to do this, it creates an unfair playground. I always try and bid by the rules, but I’m often up against others who don’t, and if they slip through the net then this can be in their favour. Thus, I’m quite lucky that there is, as far as I know, only one Alick Mighall (practice singing this as a football chant…) and thus, for those who Google my name, they’ll tend to find both me and my business anyway.

Recently, I’ve had some useful wins with PPH – in that I’ve picked up some good work and found some useful freelancers – so I’ll continue to use the site.

Too many poorly conceived projects and low quality providers

So, what’s the bad and the ugly? Well, its two worst points are probably not PPH’s doing as such – even it does create the environment in which this happens, and those are a) a lot of poorly conceived projects, and based on the number of bids that many of these projects get, b) too many providers bidding at prices, at which I believe, it’s not possible to do a good quality job.

On the projects front, I think the team at PPH have done a better job at filtering out the really stupid requests. It’s a while, for example, since I’ve seen projects like ‘e-bay clone required – budget, less than £250′. However, I do still see a lot of projects, in which the brief details a project which surely can’t be done within time the quoted budget allows. What’s this down to? Project owners knowing that there are people out there who’ll code for food? Or who realise it’s a buyer’s market? Or is it just a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of time a quality job might take? I think its often the last point. Price competition can be a good thing, I’ve no issue with that. My beef is really about the time it takes to do a good job.

This project here – for a business directory – is a good example. Basically, the client is looking for a business directory to be built, similar to a competitive example, which is quoted, which will have a CMS, so that they can add their own listings, ad serving, so they can monetise it, some static pages and the directory needs to be searchable. Oh, and it needs to be delivered ASAP! The budget is less than £250.

Ok, so lets take PPH’s commission out of that, and that leaves us with £225 which we’ll then divide by the minimum wage in the UK – a rate of pay you’d usually associated with unskilled labour – about £5.75. That gives 39 hours to deliver the project, assuming that there are no costs such as hosting, domain purchase etc. That 39 hours has got to cover the development from end to end, starting with clarifying the client’s ‘brief’ – defining some kind of spec from that and then nailing down in writing what exactly will be delivered, to designing, coding, getting sign off, testing and bug fixing. Why would any developer worth their salt bid on that? Well, as it goes, 20 have. And there are still 11 days left until the bids close.

For all PPH’s good points, I don’t see how having projects like this, or a network of providers prepared to bid at such rates can be in anyway a positive thing for the network, or for the wider industry as a whole. Fair enough – PPH is a network that allows project owners to circumnavigate bloated agency fees. It also allows project owners to consider quotes from providers who are based outside of the UK and thus are able to do things more cost effectively. Both these are good points. But if that’s at the expense of creating a perception where actually web development is easily done, for peanuts, or in an unfeasibly short amount of time, then that’s a bad thing. Buying an online service is like buying any other. You still get what you pay for. But I think many people think this just doesn’t apply to online.

I’d be interested in thoughts on this. I’d be even more interested in seeing similar examples of what a £250 solution looks like to a project briefed similar to the one I’ve quoted.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

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