Detailed requirements have always been the long distance challenge. I had a customer in Boston last year who refused to ever write anything down. I had to “interpret” his meaning on multiple phone calls each week. If it wasn’t for the FreeMind mindmapper, the Leo outliner and Valium, I’d never have been able to build his system.

The only caveat that I have is that you *must* be crystal clear in your requirements, and to be able to put all your requirements in writing!

As regards our logo though we just went with Gotlogo.com, “home of the $25 logo”. Ok, they might not be top class but we were quiet happy with results considering what we paid.

Then I did a start-up in 2002 which didn’t work out because, post-crash, a huge chunk of our market had switched to using India. The solution was to re-train and move up the food-chain.

As each role becomes commoditised, it will move to lower-cost countries and I think that is only fair. One thing that galled me about Live8 was all the “let’s make poverty history” coming from people who the very next day were fighting tooth and nail to keep sugar beet subsidies unchanged thus continuing the impoverishment of sugar cane producers outside the EU.

Smart people will always find ways of specialising and upskilling to stay ahead. I don’t think you are going to have any issues there, Eoghan.

My search for development expertise went from India to Latvia to Poland and ended up in the UK. The right people with the right skills and right attitude at a reasonable price win every time.

BTW, even on Elance, I didn’t go with the cheapest price, I went for a median one with the style that I wanted.

Interesting that an Irish company put in a bid for the work which unfortunately was double everyone else’s.