Hiring a developer when you cannot run a technical interview is a solvable problem. Decide whether you are buying a build, a fix or maintenance; learn the four role shapes and which one your job needs; specify hosting, domain and code access before anyone quotes; and agree the handover checklist on day one, not at the end.
If a project is drifting, the usual instinct is to ask for more updates — which makes it worse. Agree the communication contract on day one, use a status format that takes two minutes to write, give feedback in one prioritised round, and treat revisions as something countable rather than an open tap.
Escrow solves one specific problem — committing to pay a stranger before you have seen the work — and it is worth knowing exactly what it does on LanceGuru today, because funding a milestone records the commitment rather than collecting the money. How to split a project into milestones both sides can judge, write one acceptance criterion each, reject a deliverable well, and what evidence decides a dispute.
“What does a website cost?” has no answer, and any figure you read online was invented for someone else's project. Here is a method instead: three budget models and when each one fits, how to turn scope into a range you can defend, and why the cheapest bid is usually the most expensive outcome.
A pile of proposals is not a problem of judgement, it is a problem of process. A two-pass filter that gets you from twenty proposals to four serious candidates in an afternoon, the four questions that separate people who do the work from people who describe it, and a 20-minute call agenda that actually decides something.
Twenty proposals and not one you can compare? The problem is usually upstream, in the brief. Here are the six things every project brief must state — outcome, scope boundary, what you supply, budget range, timeline and how you will judge “done” — plus the same job posted badly and posted well.