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> > > HOME / MANAGE / STAFFING / MANAGING / Managing
Your Freelancers
Article by Peter Cooper Help! If you often cry this word out while working on your Web site, perhaps it's time you considered getting some external assistance. Whether you're self-employed, an employee of a large firm or a director of a non-profit organization, there may come a time when you need to hire professionals to help you with certain tasks. In this article, we're going to look at the intricacies of dealing with external companies and staff, highlight potentially dangerous areas, and fully understand the processes involved. Whether you're just hiring someone to write a small piece of code or getting a company to develop your entire Web site, we hope that this article will give you some confidence during your negotiations. Preparation Before you get in touch with potential agencies or freelances, you need to work out exactly what you want to achieve. If you only have a vague idea, you could be tempted to spend more money on 'creative solutions' dreamed up by your newly found assistants. You also need to come up with a rough budget that you need to remain within. Whether you own a large corporation or are just a freelancer yourself, there always needs to be a realistic budget because it's all too easy to be tempted by additional features and gadgets that you don't really need, and which would make the project unviable. If you're not a solo enterprise, you need to develop an internal protocol for dealing with the external company/freelancer. This simply means that you agree who has to approve any decisions passed on to the external agent. In an agency I once worked for, someone who worked at a client's company called up the creative director and asked for a number of changes to be made to a design. When the project was finished, the main contact at the client's company blamed us for faults within the design. The problem was that different people at the client's HQ were calling up with different (and conflicting) requests. Avoid this at all costs. It'll end up costing you more money to get the mistakes fixed afterwards.
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