oDesk is a marketplace for forming and managing online teams. They have released a 2010 report listing information they have collected from their experience listing online employment opportunities. The report contains plenty of interesting information: most oDesk contractors are located in the US, for instance. Also that web developers are (crazily) charging an average of $13/hour.
Oh, and that the fourth most sought-after skill, right after speaking the English language, is WordPress.
The question is, though: what exactly does the “WordPress” skill entail? does that mean the ability to blog? To successfully click and navigate a web-based dashboard? Likely it means theme and plugin development. Or, maybe it follows English for a reason. Maybe WordPress is a language in and of itself, full of capital “p”s, mailing list discussions, and freedom.
Seriously though, how important is WordPress in your work? And along with that, where do you find WordPress related work? Ever pulled work from oDesk?
Interesting… I hire locally and occasionally remote but only ppl I know through the WP community or that I’ve met through wordcamps.
I do know guys that use oDesk all the time and have had mostly good results with it. Me however, I can’t come to trust it yet for any development. My standards are high and I still don’t feel like I’d get that from that site.
I’m willing to try it out, but only for a personal project to see how it went.
I would say most of that WP ‘skill’ will be custom theme development related, and plugins dev. Ability to blog or use WP to post content for a client normally falls under SEO/Content/Data Entry services, at least in my region.
agreed… theme dev (psd to wp) and custom plugin stuff.
I could see some content writing but probably not much
There are over 15,000 contractors mentioned for WordPress on oDesk. Of the top 10 (5 stars) 1 was SEO, the other programmers. $40 (Russia) to $10.00 (India) per hour for programmers and $7.78 for the SEO maven. Also say some hourly as low as $3.39 on page 2 for a Phillipine SEO.
Hey Chuck, I do a lot of work on oDesk – but you can hire me directly too 😉
I’m not competing with the low ballers though, I have plenty of good feedback and work history.
@Paul. 10-4, link me up I’ll see if I can throw you anything. chuck–at–rynoweb-com
Tried to hire some WP developers through ScriptLance but quality isn’t as it used to be. I was already looking at Elance, but I will certainly check oDesk too, thanks for the reminder!