Depends on the complexity of your project, I have had simple things done very cheaply and with great success.

I'd ask people who have done it for their experiences - for every one good I hear, I have personally fixed 5 or 6 bad experiences.

https://www.elance.com/ is another place to source contractors.

(and I am on there: https://www.elance.com/s/applecado/10179/ !)

Brilliant folks - will check out Freelancer. I know a competitor's got one done by a developer in Pakistan from one of these sites for a great price and I've seen it. Quite something compared to the usual run of the mill sites that are kicked out!

You can go to India/Pakistan/Bangladesh for work, but the key thing is that you have an absolutely watertight specification. And by watertight, I mean a specification that describes what happens on every possible event down to the finest detail.

Much of the work involved in building a dynamic web site is not just the design and the obvious bits, but the things which make it properly robust. These include:

1) Security considerations
2) Error handling (assuming the user is incredibly stupid)
3) Administration interfaces
4) Code optimization and load handling
5) Comprehensive testing

Often though the only way you may encounter problems in these areas is months down the line when something goes wrong (e.g. database breached through a simple MySQL injection and all user account passwords, which are stored in plain text, are stolen), and you discover you essentially got what you paid for - i.e. very little. Basically you lose all attention to detail with the cheap players.

The reason why good and robust sites cost lots of money is akin to the difference between a freshly painted car that's otherwise good for the scrapheap and one that has also had a full mechanical restoration - the parts that are not obvious, but matter just as much, take time and money to do well.

I am not at the cheap-as-chips end of the business so you may think I have a vested interest in offering this advice, but I am telling you the honest truth. For simple straightforward websites or little plugins etc, sure, go ahead - you will probably save some money. But for bigger or more complicated projects, it is worth the money to get the job done right - trust me.

I am in Malaysia and thus have the luxury of charging less than someone in the UK would (and have happy clients in Europe), but I don't compete with the In/Pa/Ba folk. If you are interested, please e-mail me or check out the link in my profile.

Agree.

One of the best things I saw was a long time ago, but for a UK bank and the spec involved year 2000 testing. It was discovered that the code worked only for a given range of dates (matching the test data) which turned out to be hard coded into the system.

Having previously worked in IT myself I agree entirely - for anything large and complex I'd want a long established UK business to be fully accountable. Having said that, I've seen some absoultel;y dire IT projects and websites kicked out by some of the most famous UK and US names we've all heard of and who are supposed to be top of their game. Sadly, it's never possible to get a completely watertight spec written for an IT project/website and its' also never possible to make it totally rubust. Anyway, I digress. Thye site I'm after is pretty simple and certainly wont be taking logins etc. It wont have any more secure or secret data on it than the page text.

Cheers folks!