Right, so you’ve either left work or college, and you’re at a loose end. You’ve designed websites for fun for the last few years, or dabbled with the Adobe suite and know your way round it. And you’re missing this month’s rent. What do you do?

Well, if you’re preparing to enter the freelance game to earn a quick buck and have found some sites that seem your cup of tea, one thing I do advise is extreme caution. The sites I will be mentioning below seem all well and good to begin with, but once you’ve been in the game for a few months, you quickly learn that fast buck you wanted earn is the hardest buck you’ll ever earn.

So let’s start at the beginning. A quick Google search for ‘freelance websites’ garners this:

As you can see, there’s no shortage of freelance sites out there, and a confusing prospect for someone who isn’t clear on what they want to do. So let’s clear it up.

There are two main types of freelance sites out there, both of which require you to have good confidence in your ability, a lot of patience, and a lot of the time, dropping your standards/expectations. The two main freelance sites are bidding sites and competition sites. Competition sites will be discussed in Part 2, coming soon.

Bidding Sites

The two main bidding sites I used to use, and still do for the latter, were Get A Freelancer and Elance. Upon visiting these will notice a vast difference to the quality of the work and bids on them, with Elance seemingly having the advantage of having strictly professionals and quality work, and Get A Freelancer having a lower standard of work and users. But what both sites boil down to is faceless employers posting, at times, vague job descriptions and then users bidding on projects, not knowing whether the employers are going to accept bids that show outstanding work, or just the lowest price.

This can be infuriating at times, particularly on Get A Freelancer, when it’s obvious who are the ones who design for passion, and the ones who design for simply because they can – and then the latter wins the bid. Not because they have the biggest portfolio, or the most passionate message – but because they post the absolute lowest bid. I know that is how business is done, but what I don’t understand is if you have a passion about your business or brand, why you would allow for the lowest quality work at the lowest possible price just so that the bidder can add your name and brand to their ever growing list of people they’ve done ‘work’ for. Below is a few examples of bids/projects on Get A Freelancer, their descriptions and subsequent bids.

What is irritating about Get A Freelancer is the users who post projects are blinkered in the sense that they want entire websites created, along with graphics, logos and ads – all for a minimum price, sometimes as low as $30! To me, $30 secures you a few simple graphics – not an entire website, code and all. Slightly more irritating is people actually bid the lowest just to secure the contract. Looking at the images below you’ll see what I mean…

Compare this, however, to the system that Elance use. First of all, you have to pass a basic logic test, which is surprisingly efficient at warding off lesser individuals, and then makes you have to pass a test so that you can list certain programs or areas as specialties. As well these tests, there is also a membership system where you can buy plans, that come with extra credits enabling you to bid for more jobs. Whether this is an indicator to an employer of how serious you are I don’t know, but it’s good that there is a limit from the start to stop people mass bidding on projects, not caring on whether they get the contract or not.

Also, the job listing system used by Elance is more effective and descriptive, providing freelancers with a clearer idea of what they’re bidding on. When you get past the list of jobs and select a post, probably the first thing you’ll notice is that the job prices are more realistic on there, more akin to the kinds of prices a designer would propose personally. This, in turn, attracts users who are more realistic about their abilities, and will post bids with a realistic turnarounds, and budgets.

As you can see, there is a massive difference between these two sites – one genuinely seems catered for professionals, the other for the cheapest work going. Many of the projects posted on Elance are realistic in terms of pricing and structure, and yet you can find similar jobs on Get A Freelancer for a tenth of the budget. How they realistically expect people to accept that an entire site design including SEO, images and copy to cost as little as $250 is beyond me.

Researching this post led to several freelance site bashing blogs, many of who find it, like me, unfair that people have desperate designers in a catch 22 situation where either they risk doing work for next to nothing and to have your work done in vain almost, and then on the other hand have no chance of applying for jobs on Elance through the sheer amount of professionals on there. It’s almost as if you have to lower yourself to bidding on lower projects on Get A Freelancer, just to bump up your portfolio, and then it’s a waiting game until you can either afford to buy more categories on Elance, or more bids. Obviously, my summing up does not include every aspect that these two sites offer, and the best thing to do is head over to the respective sites to have a look yourself, and compare the differences between them.

These certainly aren’t the only freelance bidding sites out there, but I thought I’d collect, to me anyway, from the lowest end to the highest end to show you an example of freelancing via bidding sites. In Part 2 I will be writing about competition sites, where work is in done on spec – before you’ve even been paid.