We’ve been hard at work making improvements to our blog both in the features and content department, but for some reason, we here at Elance have a feeling in our gut that we’re still missing something.

You!

Starting now and happening once a month, we’ll be publishing a blog article written by you, the true experts of getting online work done. Not only do you get a little time in the limelight (and some promotion in the monthly Elancer and links back to your profile page), but we’ll also be paying you for your hard work by giving you $200 per article in cold hard cash.

Now before you fire up your trusty word processor and start crafting words together, there are a few things you should know before you get started.

Elance, where companies find, hire, manage and pay contractors online, today released its August edition of the “Elance Work Index”, ranking the Top 100 skills in today’s online labor market. Derived from data from more than 100,000 jobs posted on Elance in recent months, the Elance Work Index is a leading market indicator for online work tracking the hiring trends of the 60,000-plus companies that actively hire contractors on Elance to get work done.

This month’s Elance Work Index reinforces the insatiable need for IT and marketing expertise with graphic design, open source technologies, and online marketing skills topping the charts. Notable trends from this month’s Index include:
 

• Design of the Times: Graphic Design (#1) has regained the top spot in the Index trumping PHP (#2) which had held the pole position the past four consecutive months.
   
• Tech Still Trumps: Technology hiring trends continue to reaffirm the open-source movement with PHP (#2), MySQL (#3), Joomla! (#8) firmly entrenched in the Top 10.
   

With Apple, Palm, and Google claiming their share of the lucrative mobile application pie, it’s easy to say that little apps equals big, big business.

Then there’s Microsoft.

Currently sitting on the outside, the big M is looking in with hungry eyes, and its intentions are clear. In addition to developing an upcoming mobile application store, the software development giant recently published a new case study on the Microsoft Developer Network website that details the process of porting a complex iPhone app onto the Windows Mobile platform.

The application detailed in the project, “Amplitude”, is an iPhone app that takes any sound in the phone’s surroundings, quiet or loud, and amplifies it while displaying a graphical waveform of said sound. According to PCWorld, Amplitude can pick up sounds not normally audible to the ear and amplify them, such as heartbeats. Inspector Gadget, eat your heart out.

Hi. I'm Matt Katsaros and I've been using Elance to get work done online for quite some time. Today, however, I'll be doing something a little bit different. You and I both know how Elance works to some extent, thanks to documentation and word of mouth testimony. Post a job, find a provider, complete the job, pay for the work, leave feedback... you know, the whole nine yards. In reality though, it's one thing to know how something works, and it's a another thing to see the beast in action.

This is where I conveniently come in.

I'll be taking you through my personal experience getting a job done on Elance, step-by-step in a multi-part blog series. You'll see everything I encounter from day one to day end, whenever the job wraps up. Now, a little background about myself.

I founded and currently run a company helping small-to-mid sized businesses gain exposure online mainly through the development of websites. I found Elance and quickly realized I could tap into a huge force of people when needed; Elance has thousands of web developers that I could hire at any time that could help me build the sites my clients need.

Recently, one of my long time clients, Jim Willenborg, founder and chairman of Cloud Telecomputers, called me for a new project. He explained that they were preparing to publicly announce their new product, The Glass, a new Google Android-based IP phone for the office. Their current website was in need of a major a face lift as well as some fresh new content to mark the event of this product launch. Business has been busy for myself and my company, and unfortunately, all of our programmers are occupied with other jobs. However, I didn’t want to turn Jim away since he’s been a long running client of mine, so I decided that this was the perfect job that I could source out to Elance and manage the progress of it to make sure we provided Jim with a great site.

When I took a peek at the old site, it reminded me of prehistoric cave drawings meets the Internet. Loading up the homepage brings up some basic Arial text, a logo, and a snooze-worthy picture of a cloud-filled sky. For a company launching what could be the next big technological innovation, a site that looks like it’s from the ‘90s isn’t going to cut it.