Seeing as most businesses have a limited marketing budget, a new and attractive option for webmasters and small businesses might be to use crowd-sourcing.
Unlike hiring a freelance professional to do the work, you can put it to the crowd instead! They can write your code (like at www.cambrianhouse.com), give you ideas, advise you in certain areas (like at www.innocentive.com or www.linkedin.com) and even design your website for you (such as at www.sitepoint.com/contests)!
Aside from the obvious benefits such as price, competition and the chance to advertise your project – you don’t have to pay for the designs you don’t use. To top it off, you can define a strict creative brief for your crowd of designers to abide by.
Despite the fact I haven’t used it yet, the quality of the content produced at Sitepoint.com seems to be quite promising. Just take a look at this contest for an Autism site.
Not only do the designs look professional, but at the cost of a few hundred dollars, it seems to beat the prices of a LOT of graphic designers out there.
Has anyone actually tried one of these services out? Or have you been scared off by something? I know submitting your work to the internet can publicise it to your competitors but for many people I can see it being a fantastically viable option. Checkout Crowdsource for more alternatives.
Hi Robert – Thought you might be interested in this post we wrote on crowdsourcing internationalisation. It talks about how Pixelsoup employed crowdsourcing to address customer demand for local translations of Shopify.com (PS’s ecommerce shopping site).
Hey Simon,
Thanks for the read, that is pretty amazing. It’s just like what Azureus did.
Crowd-sourcing is contributing to the wide scale devaluation of a highly specialized industry, and though it may seem like a good idea upfront, really does a disservice to both the client and the creative.
Proper design firms work with the client to develop creative that is on-point, on-market and tailored carefully to the client’s needs. It is a detailed, thorough process requiring a collaborative relationship, and by crowd-sourcing, you’re doing the equivalent of picking up a dollar-store magnifying glass when you should be getting a prescription from an optometrist.
Not only that, but design contests are unethical (see no-spec for more). You’re asking dozens of people to work several hours for free… and the only people willing to do that are the unexperienced and the desperate… not the talent you want working on your brand.
I guess thats the downside for paying for something so cheap. Traditionally though, competition is useful for keeping industries fresh – just like how sharks eat the slower fish.
If you can afford it – and most places can – a good creative team would do a better job. But for someone starting off and with little funds, crowd sourcing becomes an attractive option.
Say what you may crowd sourcing is here to stay and honestly I’ve seen more talent on crowd sourcing sites then I have ever seen coming out of design studios. The only thing that crowd sourcing undermines is the ego of the design elite who would like nothing more but to think that they are the Gods of design. Crowd sourcing gives these design studios something to strive for- Quality-.