PROGRESS THREAD (James F) Startup #2

[FastNAwesome]

As far as monetizing; it will take a 10% fee from the project price from the freelancer.

As a freelancer I see a bit of a trouble with this. On $100 project it sounds fine, 10 bucks. On $10k project, that's $1000, which is for most people enough to motivate them finding ways to "cut the middleman".

They'll try to find way around it and they'll usually manage to do it. Countless times I've bid on projects with sincere intention to go through the site, just to have employers PM me their contact and insist I contact them directly.

On the other hand, you'll often see jobs conducted via freelance sites, where the job itself is worth like $500, and then afterwards employer sends a $8000 bonus to the freelancer for good work. All official, all through the website, but I think you see the flaw.

One of the websites I use solved it this way:

- if you're a free member, everything is free, but their commission is 10%
- if you're a gold member (something like $10-20/mo), everything is free, and their commission is 3% - which is acceptable on any sum, given the fact that your website provided the gig.

All serious freelancers (like myself) have no problem giving $10-20 bucks, as we're confident we'll get a lot of jobs, and already have some expenses anyway, like server etc. so we got over the "I-want-it-all-free" phase.

Freebie seekers are usually beginners anyway, and will be happy to earn whatever, and to give you 10% of it.

Also, being a golden member brings perks, like having your bid positioned higher, being perceived as more serious and credible etc. so usually all the freelancers that work constantly, just keep renewing this, so it can really add up.

While on the subject of money... If you want freelancers from everywhere to join the site, account for some other payment method except Paypal, it's unavailable in many places.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[James Fake]

Hey Fast,
I 300% agree with you. I know which site you are speaking of too =) and working as both a freelancer/buyer myself; I've ran into the same circumstances and done several deals outside the websites where the initial connection was made too. It's one of those problems that no matter what I do, will probably occur. Although; having those monthly membership fees is definitely a big deterrent like you said; and I wanted to implement this into the 1st version, but unfortunately; have to wait due to cost right now. but.. yes, this is definitely in the plans once the site gets going.

and.. it would def help weed out those 'freebie' folks versus the others, and def raise quality.. which would win overall in the big picture of things.

Yup, so for now; I'll have to manually handle the payments behind the scenes by sending out checks & shooting Paypal payments. I can already see me having to send out international express mailed checks, but gotta grind it out until I know 100% the site is going to self-sustain and then I'll open the flood gates to patch the automation.

Thanks again for your insight; very helpful!

 

[James Fake]

I think another problem* that I've ran into personally (for the site's business anyways) is that after the freelancer and buyer establish a trusting relationship and a project or two under their belt; they usually feel comfortable enough to work together off the site.

Which is great for the freelancer, kind of same for the buyer, and bad for the freelance site.

 

[James Fake]

Hey Fastlaners,
I'm opening up the prototype wireframe I have currently so you can all view it. It'll only be there for a week or two; and it's definitely in construction so please be easy on me. =]

Hoping this helps somebody out (either by motivation or clarification on wireframes)

Freelance Web Designer and Web Developers for Hire at Freelanceful.com

p.s. - This is considered more of a prototype-wireframe where it is exactly like the final version, whereas a basic wireframe would not be nearly as detailed to exact specifications like this one. But it's not quite yet a Prototype because technically a prototype is a working version whereas this one does not work in functionality yet.

Anyways,
Enjoy... Hit me with any questions if you see something that you have a question on how to create. ie: like the form input fields highlighting, etc.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[snowbank]

I like your designs a lot

 

[domular]

James where did the idea of 10,000 signups come from? Seems like it would be hard to do when people haven't seen what's behind the curtain.

 

[James Fake]

Lol, the 10K signups was something I just pulled out my butt. It sounded good; I know I'll be no where near that.. but wanted to have something so that anyone that signed up knew it would prob be a few weeks before it'll be available.

@snowbank - thanks man!!!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[domular]

Lol, the 10K signups was something I just pulled out my butt. It sounded good; I know I'll be no where near that.. but wanted to have something so that anyone that signed up knew it would prob be a few weeks before it'll be available.

And I thought it was all part of your evil master plan for world domination

 

[JEdwards]

Good looking site.. good luck with it..

 

[Pat]

looks really good

How did you do the input fields highlighting?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[James Fake]

Here's the pasted css code below. Assuming you aren't a total web designer (not sure); you would add this into your css files often called style. It will make all your fields do the highlighting and then fade out when not in focus. Kind of cool because it doesn't have to use javascript.


input, textarea {
outline: none;
transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out;
-webkit-transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out;
-moz-transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out;
border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, 0.2);
}
textarea:focus, input:focus {
box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(0, 0, 255, 1);
-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(87, 180, 246, 1);
-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(87, 180, 246, 1);
border: 1px solid rgba(87, 180, 246, 0.8);
}

 

[Talisman]

Love your keywords.

(And I was only looking so I could see what to look for in google to see how you're ranking!)

 

[snowbank]

How much would paying a designer to make a site like that cost?(the design aspect)

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Pat]

Awesome thanks.

I never realized you can do that with more than just links.

Here's the pasted css code below. Assuming you aren't a total web designer (not sure); you would add this into your css files often called style. It will make all your fields do the highlighting and then fade out when not in focus. Kind of cool because it doesn't have to use javascript.


input, textarea {
outline: none;
transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out;
-webkit-transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out;
-moz-transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out;
border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, 0.2);
}
textarea:focus, input:focus {
box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(0, 0, 255, 1);
-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(87, 180, 246, 1);
-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 5px rgba(87, 180, 246, 1);
border: 1px solid rgba(87, 180, 246, 0.8);
}

 

[James Fake]

@Talisman - lol, thanks.. I think I'm ranking horribly for right now, I'll be working on it here soon though.

@snow - hmm... so far I've spent about 75-85ish strong hours on it for the entire thing.. backend, frontend homepages, etc. but I am not done quite yet, probably another 10 hours to go. I usually charge $50/hour so I guess that would put the design work in the $4K-$5K range? Although; a large project like this a UI designer will cut the price and probably wouldn't take nearly as long with it as I have.. (I'm OCD since it's my own work)

@Pat - no prob. Yeah; it adds a cool effect that subconsciously (IMO) tells the user that the site's design was given much attention to details to. But it's such a easy code to put in. Also, to change the color; just change the three numbers where rgba(x, x, x, 1)

 

[Likwid24]

Hey James. What's the deal with signing up for your site? Is that for freelancers only? What do you get for signing up?

Nice work so far by the way! Don't give up on this one if it doesn't work out right away.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[MikeC]

Man, that is a great looking website.

 

[Jag]

Wireframing Process.

JamesF,

First of all - FANTASTIC idea/design! Thanks for having your two startup threads, I have learned quite a bit from both!

I had a quick question regarding wire framing. Can you give a quick overview of the process? What programs due you use in development? Is all of the wireframe in html/css or did you do some PHP (or other language) coding to get it like that? Did you do all of the graphics work yourself (using Photoshop or similar?)

Just trying to get my head around how to build a real website from ground up (I would like to move away from editing templates!)

Thanks for any insight you can give and best of luck to you!

-Todd

 

[James Fake]

Hey James. What's the deal with signing up for your site? Is that for freelancers only? What do you get for signing up?

Nope; it's for everybody (project posters and freelancers). If you submit your email; all I'll do is shoot a mass email out to everyone once it launches. Thanks for the compliments; I am def going to give this one my all.

@MikeC - thanks man!

@Jag - your welcome, no prob. Yep, so the wireframing was done with Dreamweaver and Photoshop. It is in entirely html and css. The graphics were all done in Photoshop. I usually start with the backend part where users are logged in; and I'll get the overall template (navigation, body, footer) together. Then I'll just fill in the navigation and content areas with what each page needs.

The main difference between editing templates and starting from scratch is the initial div structure. So.. once you learn how divs float (kind of like tables in a way, sort of) and how you can place them side by side and/or stack on top of one another; you can easily set each div it's own width and height.

Let's say you have a 1000px wide site. You can do a 1000px wide, 100px tall div for the header. Then float left a div that is say 300px wide x 700px high for the navigation on the left, then float left a div to fill up the rest of that gap at 700px (1000px - 300px) wide and 700px high (to match the other's height).

Hope that helped some. But once you can get the divs done, the rest is pretty much filling in the blanks like majority of editing templates.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[James Fake]

Just checking in real quick..

Finished the
- How It Works section...
- About Us section...
- Support section...

Working on making a quick Terms of Service and Privacy agreements..

Looks like we're on track with coding to functionality as well.. we are using some of the latest, fastest tools for this app: Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, Haml (cleaner type of html), Sass (cleaner type of css), Git & Github, Heroku hosting, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront..

I am definitely treading in new territory but it's actually exciting to learn this new stuff.. the coder is a forward thinking guy and loves using the latest, best tools available. (he's in Austin, which is like the 2nd Silicon Valley)

Anyways; I know I said I was going to write up reasons why I went with Ruby on Rails, so here's a quick PROs list:

1) Development is faster because there are a lot more automatic, powerful tools..

2) Rails guys aren't your usual 1-2 year coders.. they usually moved onto Rails from something prior to (php), and Rails guys are usually the higher quality coders because they care more about the quality, efficiency, organization, looks, elegance of the code. They usually don't move onto Rails because it's more money, but rather because it makes coding fun for them, and they have passion behind it.

3) Tons, and I mean tons of resources for help on Rails, so whenever I get stuck. I hit the IRC chat with 500+ folks online all the time, or any of the 100,000 blogs.

4) PHP can get spaghetti and nasty, and become ugly code really quickly which leads to inefficiencies and slowness. (not saying Rails can't, but it's much more unlikely)

5) Tons of great add-ons (gems) and other stuff that folks build all the time for free.

6) Passionate group. I've never met so many passionate coders. You'll find tons of specific services like hosting just for Rails (heroku.com). And the people who run these services are super passionate and love contributing to the Rails community.

7) It's going to become (if not already) a very big gorilla in the room as far as coding languages go. It's not just a bandwagon, it's a pretty huge movement at this point with a lot of momentum. I doubt it will fade away into the background; it will be here for at least another 15-20 years. and MongoDB is a new type of database that doesn't use tables & schema like with MySQL. It works in a whole different way with documents. It will hit mainstream here fairly soon.

8) It fits my style. Just like how I like to make clean, simple, but very powerful designs. RoR is the same way: clean, simple, but powerful.

That's it off the top of my head for now. Again, check out the wireframe.freelanceful.com and check out the How It Works, About Us, and Support sections and let me know what ya think. Also, to see the backend stuff; just click the Login button without a user/pw for now and it'll let you in.

Til next time,
- James F

 

[77startup]

Loving the reasons why you use ruby, keep it up james.

 

[bernieshawn]

I just took a look at the backend - how are you going to implement the escrow system? I've been wanting to install an escrow system somehow on a project of mine but it seems really complicated - that and I cant find any guides/tutorials on the subject.

The site looks awesome, though!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[BeachBoy]

you have a really great layout.

I feel that the way you did it (psd -> html -> code) makes the end result much more appealing than the other way around (code -> html -> psd)

currently, on a project I am working on, I have to go from code (Magento ecommerce platform) and edit/modify poorly designed pages (it's a hacked indian script that incorporated groupon clone to magento backend) and templates in order to make them look closer to what I want, edit the colors, buttons, images and replace logos.

it is extremely painful and for sure on my personal project I will use your approach (since I won't have to use a packaged platform). The only upside is that it divides the development time by 10, but if we get the venture capital for the "whole" project, then we'lld ef. redesign from psd and move to a custom coded platform.

continue your great work, I am really impressed

 

[77startup]

JamesF the site is starting to look really good. Did you do most of it yourself? Btw can you add animation as a category?

 

[James Fake]

@bernie - Just be using a merchant bank account to hold the money, and when the freelancer requests a release, I will pull the money from that merchant account to them.

@beachboy - Thanks! Doing the design first has a huge impact on how the User Experience is on the site. Which IMO, is the most important thing of any website.

@77startup - Thanks.. Yup; everything but the hardcode coding behind it. I have the categories function where I can go and add/delete them later on.. so after the initial launch of the site; I'll prob go back and re-tweak it depending on how the users find what works the best.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[James Fake]

Update - August 16, 2011

Got quite a few things done. I got just about everything done (on my end, the coder is working on the web app functionality). The privacy policy, terms of use, contact us, about us, etc. etc. is all done.

I also got the blog up and running: Freelanceful Blog
Got the support forum up and running as well: All Discussions - Freelanceful Forums - Still a work in progress as I make it look and match the rest of the site. It's using Vanilla forums software which I highly recommend. It's great, not as deep as vbulletin or phpbb though; enough to be light and get the job done for it's use.

After I get some rest (it's 6:44am here in Nashville; I stayed up all night like I have for the past months); I'll be knocking out the SEO on-page work and re-launching a more extensive splash page. Pretty much; it will be the entire site made public except a few parts which will lead back into an email submission form.

This should hold and build up a bit of SEO as the web app gets completed for launch. Similar to the same method as I did with Fendza. I'll also begin working on some SEO. (I would of normally done SEO work a long time ago to build the rankings up, but for Freelanceful; search engine traffic isn't the main source of planned traffic for it, it's more secondary traffic. So it can build on the side and I can focus a bit more on quality and not quantity SEO tactics)

p.s. - the blog was made from a free template. I just tweaked up a few things like font size, colors, etc.

 

[James Fake]

FYI; I usually 110% of the time would put the blog as a sub-folder or sub-directory on my website. For instance freelanceful.com/blog instead of blog.freelanceful.com

With sub-folders; all the pages would count towards your main domain and raise it's keywords associated with the domain (check Google webmaster), make your site bigger, and any link juice would go somewhat towards to main domain.

However, since I put it as a sub-domain (blog.freelanceful.com) it won't nearly be as effective SEO wise. I had to do it this way because since the site is built on Ruby on Rails and Heroku, it's not your typical average php related server. So with wordpress it's php based, and the rest of my site is RoR, it would not integrate. If I wanted to put a blog on the sub-folder, I would need to make a brand new blog software using RoR.

There is one way around it, but I decided against it as I didn't want the codes to be mixed up and wanted the RoR in it's own domain to keep things simple. It was to do a proxy redirect; which means if someone visited Freelanceful.com/blog (on the Heroku server), it would redirect them to another hosting server with the wordpress files at the same address freelanceful.com/blog. It's sort of complicated and could get messy and have issues/problems with visitors going to the blog. So I ultimately decided to just put it on a subdomain using another hosting server I normally use.

I am looking to make the blog; not only a leading blog in freelancing topics, but also on web app startups. I also want a few viral posts about internet marketing and seo on there as well. So I'm hoping I can eventually make the subdomain to have great 'trust, authority' from Google's eyes, and any links from that subdomain to my main Freelanceful.com domain would weigh a bit more. There's arguments that Google sees subdomains as part of the original so if that does happen, the links won't count much, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

 

[mrhahn]

Would a 301 redirect via htaccess from freelanceful.com/blog to blog.freelanceful.com help in SEO?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[James Fake]

That's a good question. More than likely yes, it would carry over the page seo juice from any pages 301'd to another page. Of course, you'd lose some juice, and any links you built up still pointing at url.com/blog instead of blog.url.com would be reduced a bit in power.

Problem for me is that with Heroku hosting for Ruby on Rails; I can't access the .htaccess files to edit them.

 

[77startup]

Do you regret going with rails as opposed to something like cake php?