For web design, I'd have no problem going with an offshore coder.

For software development, it's much more of a mixed bag. If you are marginally fluent in coding yourself, then it can potentially be sensible to work with an offshore programmer, but the problem is, unlike a web design where it either works or it doesn't, a software application can, worst case, have hidden backdoors, time bombs, etc and best case simply have bugs or problems that don't show up until sometime later after the application is deployed.

Of course, the same issues are true with US coders, but the issues I've run into is often times the offshore coders will cut corners and charge you for a totally custom application when they're really just customizing some standard open source app, or else they'll take something written for another purpose and sort of jam the code to your application. I haven't seen as much of that with US-based coders.

And the other issue is... if you're working with an outsourced company instead of an individual freelancer, you might have 3 or 5 or 10 people building your application, so you can have a mishmash of code of variable quality, and you're also more likely to run into translation issues because the project manager you speak to is usually not one of the programmers, and sometimes isn't even terrilbly technical.

So... I wouldn't say don't do it, but I'd also say be very careful and be prepared to really micromanage the project if you want something that ends up being really high quality.