I seem to have got onto some kind of offshore web development spam list. I’m getting a torrent of emails detailing the benefits of outsourcing all of my coding to a foreign country, and whilst this is insulting as a freelancer, just check out these prices:

Web Designer (Skills: Dreamweaver / Adobe Photoshop/Flash MX): £700/ $1400 per man month (180 hours)
PHP Web Developer (Skills: PHP/ MySqL): £800/ $1600 per man month (180 hours)
ASP.NET Web Developer (Skills: ASP / HTML / VBSCRIPT / JAVASCRIPT / SQL SERVER): £800/ $1600 per man month (180 hours)

£700 a MONTH for a basic web designer! this is a fraction of the cost you pay in this country for a quality individual. Whilst i’m sure this is tempting to a number of people, I cannot stress strongly enough the dissatisfaction you will meet in using one of these services. The substantial language and timezone barriers aside, I am yet to meet anyone who has been satisfied with their offshore project. In those who have signed off work, the project lifetime has been unexpectedly short due to poor development practices and coding, and often work has been redone at greater expense. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.