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I prefer to do work on my own sites, but I occasionally take one-off small business website jobs where I work with a designer, who owns the client relationship. Most of these sites are content management sites where I hand off ownership and maintenance of the content to the designer for posterity - I build the site, hand off a zip file and I am done.

I enjoy the CMS theming/skinning and configuration, but hate the tedium initially populating the content (page text and images), which is something the designer and client want me to do. I try to dissuade them from this by offering to train them for an hour at my usual rate and then they can do it, or alternatively pay my development rate to do the copy/paste button-click-click-click tedium of putting their content into the CMS (which to me seems like a waste of money...they could hire a high school student to do it for less than $15/hr I would think).

Then I thought I could hire this work out, which gets me to my question:

What labor marketplaces are best for getting someone to do this piece work: log into the CMS from wherever, create pages, and populate them with provided text and images.

Mechanical Turk? or something else?

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Mechanical turk sucks, you usually want to get a good low dollar contractor. – Frank Mar 11 '11 at 23:18

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The solution I decided on is to just hire my 12 year old daughter to do it. She is fully capable of performing this work, and is looking for ways to earn money to buy an iPad 2.

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+1 for micro economics. you could have hired a 15 dollar guy in india and dealt with his CRAPPY accent but you did not! YOU ARE THE MAN! Not only did you keep the job in the USA but you kept it in your own family. Plus, since she will buy her own IPAD 2, you saved 600+ dollars because if she werent working for you, chances are she would get it anyways. EVERYONE SHOULD UPVOTE YOUR QUESTION AND YOUR OWN ANSWER. Pat, there is nothing more patriotic than keeping it local. Great job, and creative way to solve the problem. If you get really busy, you can either have more kids, or – Frank Mar 11 '11 at 23:16
hire your daughters friends, or other relatives. In his book delivering happiness Tony Hseih talks about hiring his whole family when he started his first business, and when he started the one he sold to microsoft. ++++ For keeping it in the family! With all the bullshit i see on this forum, your answer to your own question really made my day!!! Thanks! – Frank Mar 11 '11 at 23:17
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If I can suggest an alternative, have you ever tried returning a site populated with "lorem ipsum" text?

Anytime I have done contractual development on websites I populate lorem ipsum with the correct fonts and headers, then let the client input their own text.

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Good suggestion and this is my preferred solution but my persuasive powers have failed to convince the designer and client that it is better for them to do the copy/paste & image upload content management. I've tried to sell it as good training since they are going to do all the maintenance, but ultimately they just want someone to do the up-front grunt work for them. – Pat James Mar 6 '11 at 18:27

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