We thought maybe we should follow up the previous post about offshore assistants with a positive story about offshoring…

When we started this blog, our first life experiment was to see if we could use offshore labor to create a unique design for us. We’ve both worked in and around the software industry for long enough to hear a number of horror stories — most commonly these center around communication issues and a perceived lack of creativity and skill, which drives people back to hiring local talent again.

Besides being forced to search through a few uninspiring bids, both from sellers on RentACoder and companies that we mistakenly emailed directly, we essentially had no missteps. The bid we received from Claudia really stood out, since it included a well-done and fairly original portfolio, her company, Cricava, had many glowing reviews from on RentACoder, and her email style immediately gave the impression that she would be pleasant to work with.

We weren’t looking for something incredibly slick or particularly Web 2.0, we were mostly interested in having a unique and playful look that was still relatively uncluttered. We asked Claudia to come up with an WordPress theme design based on tinkertoys and gave her no other instructions besides that. She first produced Photoshop mockups, which we talked about in this post, and was very quick to incorporate our feedback.

After we had agreed on a design, she implemented all the WordPress theme files, had me upload them, and did a lot of testing and refinement. After that, she did cross-browser compatibility testing for us and fixed a few remaining issues. Even after we had told RentACoder that the job was complete and the money was released to her from escrow, she continued to follow up and point out design flaws that we both had missed earlier such as small text alignment issues, and fixed those too.

In the end we asked her how many hours she had spent on the project — she estimated it at between 40 and 50 hours, for which she was paid $300, minus whatever cut is taken by RentACoder.

So, in the end we got an original design, full implementation and testing for about $6-$7/hour. Further, Claudia was an absolute joy to work with and has offered to show us around when we visit Argentina.

Toby: Later on, my friend Jeff pointed out that my homepage, kiwitobes.com, looked terrible and that a lot of people would be visiting it after the publication of my book. So I had Claudia redo that too. The minimum she could charge due to fees was $110, but for that I got 3 completely different design mockups to choose from — remarkably she had read our blog and attempted to build themes that would “match my personality”. The new kiwitobes.com is now up and I’m very happy with it.

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