I recently launched two new mashup sites. I was meaning to post about these earlier but work and the holiday got in the way. Anyway, the two new sites are the Manchester United Report and the Real Madrid Report. Soccer is something I’ve wanted to expand my growing sports network into for the last six months or so but I never got around to actually putting sites together.

Luckily, I found a guy in the UK who was wiling to write the player biographies for each of the clubs for a more than reasonable price. It was simply a matter of copying and pasting his content into my mashup CMS and the sites were live.

I normally don’t talk dollar amounts on this blog but a lot of people are curious what various projects cost so this time I’ll reveal that information. The biographies cost $30 per team. Add another $10 per team for the domains and the cost of each site was $40. I spent about an hour or two adding all of the content into my content management system to get the sites up and running.

So for $80 and a small amount of my own time, I expanded my sports network by two sites and also added an entire new sport to the coverage. I’d say that was an incredibly good deal.

I do a lot of my freelance work in an industry where time is usually of the essence. This makes for incredibly tight deadlines but also creates a lot of leeway on issues of billing. If you want something don’t quickly, but correctly, sometimes you just need to pay for it. When a client and I are working against the clock on a site it’s not uncommon for us to outsource the work of converting a design into markup for us.

That’s where services like the ones provided by Choppr come into play. They offer table-less html/css development at a very reasonable rate. For only $200, they will take your design in the form of any standard image file and in three days convert it into standards compliant, hand coded HTML & CSS markup with optimized images and cross-browser compatibility. The quality of their code (which is incredibly important to someone like me who needs to wrap PHP around it) can be seen on their site.

A nice part of the service Choppr provides is their willingness to convert a psd/png/ai layout to html. That gives your on-staff designer a lot of options and the opportunity to work in their graphic design program of choice. This again lends a helping end to web developers on strict timelines.

The idea of outsourcing markup work like this might be something new to a lot of you. I think it’s something you should strongly consider especially if converting layouts into markup is just not something you enjoy. It’s also a fantastic option for those of us who might be incredibly strong at programming but fail a bit when it comes to design. You could save a huge amount of time and stress by even outsourcing the design first and then hiring Choppr to take that layout and convert it for you.

As my freelance career has progressed I’ve had some experience with outsourcing these kinds of projects. A lot of layout converting companies promise you the world for pennies and end up delivering terrible markup that doesn’t run in a variety of browsers and ends up costing you more time and money to fix than you would’ve spent just doing it yourself.

If you’re looking for a quality group to code up a layout for you check out Choppr. They believe in web standards and clean code for a fair price and that’s pretty rare these days.