First time Elancing

[weinerschizel]

I posted up my first elance project. It's for Wordpress development, and I scoped it as precisely as I could (I'm a systems engineer mountains of experience scoping design and writing requirements). The project is very small, simply integrate two things into my plugin and should only take the developer a few hours at most...

(1) create a CSS style sheet and use divs to replace my table
(2) integrate Wordpress image handler into the admin panel portion of the plugin to select images for my advertisements the plugin hosts.

My goal is to get people talked down to the $50 mark. Of course $50 is still a fortune for what I'm asking but I want practice doing this. I have a couple questions with the whole process...

1. Some proposals are requiring I hold a virtual meeting with them. For something this small the meeting would take more time than the work. How do you guys handle this?

2. How do you guys typically approach getting your bids? I only have 3 bids in and several of them are refusing to post a price up front.

3. Do you guys use the paid site features? What extraneous charges are associated with Elance if any?

Thanks!