http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_headline=o2-no%2D--%26method=full%26objectid=18586850%26siteid=94762-name_page.html" target="_blank Is outsourcing overseas really going to save you money ?

If you are in the UK, I would imagine outsourcing be less costly in most locations. The UK currency is high and so is the living cost in comparison to many countries.

I am not sure exactly what you are asking, if we do save or not? It all depends if you know the right people in the right location. Contracting just for a price and an unknown does not always lead to a happy ending, so it may not end cheaper if the work doesn't get done.

I wish Ranten was in the forum, I'm sure he'd have something to comment about this topic.

In my experience - although the price sounds worth it up front... I've run into so many communication barriers, revisions and overruns due to not being able to convey what I want accurately that it's simply not worth it to me.

I've expirenced out-sourcing on both large civil and entertainment field of software (bit bigger than the average website) and all I'd say is you need to be really careful. Make sure they know what you want and what you expect. Get your specs right!

The plus pointis that they can be cheap that you can get them to do it, throw it away and get it done again... this time correct and usually be cheaper.

I expected opinions to be different on this. I haven't outsourced anything bcs I live in a counrt where $ are 3-4 times more worthy... so would live do finish the job for someone else.

The point is that you need to start with giving small jobs till you find the right person (freelancer). When it comes to the communication, IM, VoIP will do it, and of couse you need to be able to explain things in written with more details.

And now 2 cents from a freelancer:

I live in Latvia now, but when I was studying in Germany I had a plan to return to my country and work with international clients from there as a freelancer. But now it seems that my potential client is so ungraspable far from me and I get along with local projects, which is not the perfect choice, because it takes all the time I would invest in searching for international clients.

This whole idea about tele-jobbing hasn't really been a success, has it?

I've outsourced a few bits of work abroad but nothing graphical or programming based. Recently I had a kid in India submit one of my websites to 500 Web Directories and he only charged $10.

I created a spam email address for this task and all of the "Submission Successful" emails went straight into that email account, around 20 emails per day for a month.

I checked some of the directories a few weeks later and my site had started to show up in a lot of them, not that I expect them to have any bearing on our Google Rankings etc.

It was more of a test really, I was intrigued to know if he would actually do anything for such a low cost - especially as manual submission to directories is a long and boring task.

Might have to ask if he'll submit to 5000 directories for $100 next time :-P