[fsk]

You didn't give enough information to answer.

Are you already an expert web developer? Are you a complete beginner? You sound like a complete beginner.

Try making a simple website and putting it on the Internet somewhere.

If you have no experience, it's going to be very hard to find clients. Maybe you should work a couple years as an employee somewhere first, to get experience?

You can try bidding for jobs on those elance/odesk websites, but those will be bottom feeder clients. Those will be the type of people who expect you to make a Facebook clone for $100.

[Gustomaximus]

It feels like there needs to be a mid-range Elance site. Perhaps some minimum prices to avoid the bottom feeders plus the workers are vetted to a higher level of skill/quality.

On Elance, I've used it for some basic jobs. I'm absolutely going there for affordable labor on lower skill projects, but I'm not trying to get Facebook @ $100. A typical job would be for someone to do a basic template brochure website build (with all copy/structure mocked up) for $600-$1,000. Locally this would be $3-8k. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me for a cheaper country wage... though perhaps people would disagree.

As a client I find it tough to find guys that offer quality work. The contractors I've used are more than helpful but consistently lack attention to detail and value ad in the build process I would expect from experienced designers. Time is valuable and it seems to be death by 1,000 cuts on small comments a quality designer would typically sort out before you see.

[fsk]

Once you start to "vet the workers", then you have the problem of "how are the workers vetted"?

Those freelancer sites already have thin margins. If they start restricting their pool of workers and clients, it wouldn't work.

You get what you pay for. If you get a bargain on price, then you get lower quality or have to spend more time checking their work.

[Gustomaximus]

> Once you start to "vet the workers", then you have the problem of "how are the workers vetted"?

It's a problem but solvable. How does any employer vet applicants? It's a matter of additional process/time/cost, ideally more than covered by the higher earnings and strong demand for services.

>You get what you pay for. If you get a bargain on price, then you get lower quality or have to spend more time checking their work.

This can and cant be true. I moonlight offering marketing freelancing services. 80%+ of clients that come to me have have been sold overpriced snake-oil from boiler room marketing agencies. A big part of initial meetings is to re-establish trust in marketing. Typically I'll increase ROMI by 30%-60%, and I'm not paying myself peanuts. In the extreme I had a client last year paying ~$10k/mth to have a company list them across a handful of free directories. These business owners are experts in other areas and just don't know they are being screwed until someone more knowledgeable sees it. I'd be the same with much IT work. And if I could have a freelance service that set a quality benchmark, then I'm happy to compete on price from there. With Elance I don't know if I'm paying more for less, or less for less.

I guess this is why word of mouth and relationships are so valuable.