You know, I started to write a response to Serafina and the point about freelancing in the US vs freelancing outside the US and realized it's all a complicated issue. For those who are not interested, my last paragraph contains my comments about the original post
For example, you can find a number of good PHP programmers in both the US and in other countries bidding on these job sites. PHP programmers usually make quite a bit less than, say, .Net programmers. While there may be a lot more PHP programmers (I don't know this, it simply seems that way to me), .Net programmers usually command a better rate because serious businesses (I'm not talking about a company that depends on a website to get its business, but a business that needs real development needs for its internal business and so on) don't use PHP.
PHP is a beginner's language, in my opinion (don't take offense if you are a professional - I'm not calling all PHP programmers amateurs!), because it allows too many people that really don't know anything about true programming to fiddle around with things, write simple scripts, modify existing complex scripts, etc. PHP is (relatively) difficult to use in an object-oriented sense when compared to languages like C# (or Visual Basic, or Visual Pascal, etc), which can a big problem (or at least an ongoing major pain in the a$$) in a situation where you are writing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of lines of code for a big complex system (which may well be on the web, BTW), as opposed to writing maybe a few thousand (or maybe tens of thousands of) lines of code for a website.
I've seen too many PHP scripts that are really nothing more than procedural programming (executes line-by-line and uses only objects defined by the language itself - which really started going out of style in the early 90s) and have all kinds of issues with conversions of data types between text, null and numbers all going into the same variable, etc, etc. It has been my experience that many PHP developers are relative amateurs (remember, don't take offense if you are a true professional!) and shouldn't be trusted to write an application, but rather are more suited to small scripts that do specific things. Some guys are good at taking a lot of free scripts they find on the internet and putting them together to make a package, but even those seem to be far and few between.
I write in both PHP and C# (a .Net language). I hate PHP. I despise it. It is too easy to have problems because for the great part I can't even define a data type for a given variable (except for, in some cases, typing a parameter in a method call, for example) whereas in C# you are forced to think everything through (which ends up saving a ton of time when troubleshooting - you can look for real logic errors instead of trying to find that one line of code where things are so loose that you tried to use a boolean field with a string value or something, by accident) - the application won't even compile in C# (and yeah, PHP is interpreted, not compiled) if you don't define types or if you try to mix different types without explicit or implicit conversions of data types (some of which are simply impossible to convert anyway and it can be a good thing to have your compiler tell you that you screwed up!).
I guess my whole point is that it's a lot easier to find developers on a job site who are reasonably good at PHP, as far as the language goes, and at relatively cheap prices. It's much more difficult to find a good .Net programmer who is on the same "cheap" scale and can give you a good product.
To comment on Serafina's comment, I'm betting most freelancers on the job boards are PHP developers from relatively poor countries who are looking for a way to make decent money in their respective countries. A lot of people can claim to be good, but the successful ones have to provide a decent service, no matter their price, or they cannot continue to be successful. I think the more successful of these programmers have higher rates.
A lot of people who actually go to the US to work have schooling and have been hired by a company who helped them get a work visa and therefore make probably pretty damned good money. I remember a time when I was working a project for Dell about 10 years ago, and half of their programmers were from India working there in the US. They made good money and were smart guys. They didn't "freelance" - they didn't need to.
I remember when I went to India about 15 years ago, and there was a dearth of good programmers there at the time. I have no doubt at all the situation has improved there since then.
However, a few years ago I was working on a PHP project and had a ton of work and was looking for someone to help me. I first tried here and was surprised to find that I couldn't find anyone who met my requirements. I wrote up specifications and posted them on a job board and got a ton of applicants. For a job I suspected would cost a couple of thousands of dollars (which is a lot for a small PHP application, but it was complex, and was a vBulletin integration - double yuck), the majority of the applicants were willing to do the work for between $50 and $100 USD!!!!! I wouldn't hire them even if they made sense in relation to the specs and questions I asked! Which, of course, none of the applicants made sense. The guys who responded well were asking more than i was willing to pay at the time. I ended up doing the work myself.
Argentines who I know who left here to go to other countries did not go because they were looking for better money. They went because they were looking for a better life. They already made good money here. Though of course, not as much as they could make in the States, but they were better off here with what they made, economically, than many programmers of the same level I knew in the US who were struggling. They also had good training and years of experience.
I've never known anyone who makes good money off of the job boards, and I've tried it myself. Too many people out there look for the cheap bids and get crap product - if they get a product at all. I've tried my hand at it myself when I was having financial issues, a few times over the last ten years or so, and the projects I managed to get weren't enough to get me past a couple of weeks of living expenses and it was too hard to find a job that paid even that much. It would be like me coming here and demanding $100 USD an hour (which my ex-partner makes working for Intel in the US currently, on a contract job) where a lot of programmers here may make maybe $10 - $25 USD an hour (that's what they make - companies charge a helluva lot more for their programmers if you hire a company instead of finding individuals).
So, as a person immigrating to work in IT in the US, they're probably not moving to a small town and worried about what they're making. I'm betting they're not freelancing. Most freelancers on the boards I've seen (though it has been a couple of years, admittedly) are from places like India, China, Russia, Romania, the Philippines, etc., and can work real cheap. But too many people who look for programmers think that because they come from, say, India, that that automatically means they are good, even though dirt cheap. My experience has been otherwise.
Alright, probably way off the point on all of this, for the original question. I agree with Sleuth about the way to approach this - learn a little about Wordpress or something similar and see if you can do what you need yourself. At the very least you will learn something about what's involved and can talk to someone offering to do websites better than if you know nothing. Given the lack of information when asking for advice, I have no idea if you are looking for a static webpage or something that actually requires programming (even if just a little - either way, the skill sets involved are different). And if you end up deal with someone else, write down and organize everything you can think of that you want your application to do before you ever talk to anyone.
