If your company is limited to just a few employees, or if your specialist area is design and graphics, you may find it hard when commissioned to build a complete web solution to meet the demands of your client. Programming work can be time consuming, and needs to be handled by a specialist in the field if you want an efficient, robust and secure solution. Especially in the field of e-commerce, you simply cannot afford to have your reputation damaged when someone finds security holes all over a client's site. If you are unsure of your abilities when it comes to programming, outsourcing the work to someone who knows what he's doing can be the best way forward.

Let's say you have been working on a complete redesign for a client and that they also want the functionality changing. Having looked at the code, it's such a mess that you realise it would take you twice the allotted time scale just to figure out how it works and hence it will need rewriting from scratch. You start work on the look and feel of the site and design some new graphics since this is your strong point, and you try not to think about the back-end, this can come later. The client is happy with your work so far and is looking forward to the end result.

So, you have the design completed, your front-end XHTML/CSS is all in place, but the website you are working on still needs a shopping cart, content management facilities and user authentication implementing and you only have 3 days left! What do you do in this situation? Enter the freelancer.

Hiring a freelance programmer can significantly ease the burden when tackling difficult or large projects. You can pick and choose the areas that either you don't want to work on or don't have the time for or that you are simply unable to do yourself, and let somebody else worry about them. Not only does this free up your time to work on other aspects of a project, but it can even save you money.

A lot of freelancers will have a library of well tested programming code to draw from that means they can complete new projects very quickly, enabling them to charge less for it, and ensuring you a fast turnaround time while still getting top quality, optimized and secure code. Another great advantage to the reusable code scenario is that the code will often be very well organized making it much easier if the client comes back for something changing to avoid rewriting it all over again.

In summary, hiring a freelance programmer can save you time, money and stress, making your working life easier without the added burden of extra employees. They can deal with the areas that you can't or can help to bridge the gap between small and large projects in that period when you have too much work for your staff, but not enough to hire more.