How can I find a reputable freelancer to set up a Wordpress website?

There are several good sites where you can either load up a job that you want doing and freelancers bid or apply for that job, or you can simply look through and check out their portfolios.

These are O'desk.com and peopleperhour.com. Past users give the freelancers a review rating on how well they completed the role, so you can choose based on reputation. I personally have not found these to have great quality candidates on there, although you do get what you pay for. I tend to go by word of mouth, if a friend recommends a company/freelancer then I am so much keener to use them.

My preferred method in your case might be to find some Wordpress sites you particularly like, and look to see who these have been made by.

Here are some other sites that are highly rated by others in the field although I don't have first hand experience with them:

• Codeable.io
  
• Wphired.com
  
• Guru.com
  

You can post jobs on all of these with no obligation of hiring someone if you cannot find a suitable candidate.

I used freelancer.com a couple of years ago to try and get someone to set up a Wordpress site for me. It wasn't a great success. The bidders who won were just time wasters and in the end I gave up. I haven't tried the others mentioned above so I can't say anything positive or negative about them.

I decided to do it myself and was quite surprised at how easy it was to start it, stick a theme on there and personalise it, but it can be time consuming and frustrating when something goes wrong and you don't have someone who knows what they are doing to sort it out. 

What you should be paying for with someone who is going to set a site up for you is (alongside setting it up and the design/personalisation): Social media integration, security, help showing you the ins and outs of the site they have produced for you and also a friendly and reliable service. 

As Kathryn said it's best to ask around and do a bit of research on people beforehand, have a look at their previous work and extract what bits you think you would like for your site but also take note of the other Wordpress sites already on the net. 

To the untrained eye an impressive site (not even a blog based site) may not even appear to be produced using Wordpress software but there is a pretty easy way to tell if a site is using Wordpress of not: In your browser view the page source and look at the links in the source code. If it says /wp-content/ somewhere in the source code then it'll be produced using Wordpress. Hope this helps.