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Freelancer needs personal advice on current design of a reverse auction web site

• The question is:Why does everyone keep telling us to restart our site from scratch and they will do a better job with it? Please look at our site and let us know your personal opinion (What you might do if it were your site) on whether or not, we are going in the right direction regarding the type of code we are using, the basic formatt, and design of the site. In the end we just want to make sure the site is starting our site off on the right foot, and will be able to grow with us and be upgraded in the future. Elance updates thier site all the time. Some background information, and site url if it helps any. I recently went on an ousourcing site Scriptlance looking for a consultant to review our new site. Our first shot (old version) at the site: http://203.200.177.226/biddersworld/html/ Our NEW version in progress. http://globegetter.com/newsite/ Admin Path - http://globegetter.com/newsite/admin Platform: Red Hat Linux Database: Mysql Scripting Language: PHP Web Server: Apache And what they (the new guys) have to offer, which I think is just reselling WCWS's "http://www.smarterscripts.com/specials.shtml" Freelancer script. Please look at www.outsource4biotech.com And www.rolancers.com www.meetcontractors.com One of the people who responded gave me doubts about our, about 1/3 completed site. I don't know much about the science behind the making of a great site i.e, whether or not php is faster than perl, or linux red hat is the way to go for security reasons, or templated based sites offer future benefits, or how the admin panel should be organized. The person who responded said they have prepackaged Elance, Scriptlance, Guru, Getafreelancer, Rentacoder, etc... They claim they have all the functions of the popular sites plus some added benefits for between $600-$1600. I know these type of scripts exist and have looked at several with thoughts of purchasing one to start our site with, but we went another route and hired an India based development team to build our site from scratch. We actually had a completed site "http://203.200.177.226/biddersworld/html/" already built from scratch that they (the new team) were suppose to just "fix" and add a few modifications, because we knew it was lacking in several areas. They convienced us to redo the site and start fron scratch again making it better, that was 5 months ago. Now this guy is telling me his template sites are the way to go because I pasted his initial response below for reference. We have already created the best online reverse auction site on the market today. The site is a complete clone of Elance.com a leader in this domain and not only that also contractedwork.com,rentacoder, scriptlance concepts also incorporated inside. Basically you have two giants in one package incorporated with careful study of this business industry behind it. You don?t need any programming knowledge to run this script. Apart from great features which are incorporated, we have carefully implemented every function so that it is easy to manage as well as modify. One very unique thing about the software is that we have taken the Marketing side of things very seriously. You have at your disposal a very flexible package that allows you to switch to the needs of your target market without you having to hire a coder to upgrade the package each time you have an idea or find out that something else is working? THE SOFTWARE DOES IT ALL. We have carried out extensive research on contractedwork.com target market and its users and even when they changed their concept to suit the market need, they did this after we had already incorporated our own unique features into the application, so we are always confident that we are one step ahead at all times. We have also added other things that contractedwork.com and Elance don?t have yet, and I am sure after their research and study they will still add them in their next update. Some things that Elance software doesn?t include are the following. - NDA approvals, which are important for many projects. - Salary level acceptance , which is good for monthly contracts - Escrow payment system, for buyer and seller security - Multilingual capabilities - Advanced complaint center similar to Squaretrade - Scriptlance doesn?t have the sealed bid option These are just a few mentioned? THE GREATEST PART IS THAT 1: You will immediately receive a three year free upgrade certificate (this is so valuable because we are constantly upgrading, and spending a lot of dollars on research) 2: You will also get additional software and e-book packages to help you in your marketing - Marketing E-books - Traffic analyzers - Sales Tips from top gurus If you will be interested in this special offer we can do your site for you exactly the way you want for $1600 in 45 days maximum. or you can purchase our already existing one that contains everything you need, for $650 Please look at www.outsource4biotech.com And www.rolancers.com www.meetcontractors.com I new to Google. Please ask any questions you may want answered. Thanks for any light you can spread on this situation. Stephen

• Answer:

  Dear sublime, The people who tell you to restart your site from scratch are hoping to benefit from this advice by winning your business. It is likely that they do not have your best interests at heart but are acting from the profit motive. If I were in your place, I would not abort the current redesign. On principle alone, it is better to stay the course and carry the redesign through to completion, then wait a while longer before reassessing the new site and considering further changes. You will make no progress unless you are resolute in your decisions. As a practical matter as well, you should stay with the current redesign because the firm you have hired is clearly on the right track. The least one can say about the new site is that it is a substantial improvement over the old one. It is superior in the following respects. Aesthetics: The old site is marred by distracting banner animation, garish graphics, juvenile fonts, and glaringly bright blue borders. These features may seem interesting on first sight, but they quickly grow old and draw attention away from your content in the long run. The new site, on the other hand, has a clean and simple design that lets content take center stage. The subdued blues and modest graphics act as mere decoration for the auction listings which are rightly the focus of the home page. Functionality: The new site preserves the best features of the old one and adds a few more. An auction listing is in plain sight, which tells first-time visitors at a glance what the site is about. It also serves a practical purpose by highlighting recent projects, giving them immediate exposure to potential bidders. The two classes of users for whom the site is designed, namely freelancers and employers, are greeted with a pair of large buttons -- I don't know for a fact they are buttons, but I hope those central images will be clickable -- that guide them to the relevant portion of the site. Where the new site fails to improve on the old one is in the way its HTML markup has been structured. Markup: The layout of the new site, as of the old, is built of ad hoc HTML tables with precise pixel-by-pixel positioning. Although the designers were clever enough in each case to ensure that their tables render correctly in all major browsers, this kind of layout is difficult to upgrade or even maintain into the future. Upcoming browser standards, especially for mobile devices, are likely to render table-based layout unattractively or unreadably. Furthermore, tables promote rigid, unchanging design because their form is intimately linked with their content. A change in design requires rearranging the content, and a change in content structure may demand a comprehensive overhaul of the table design. A better solution, increasingly used by websites large and small, is to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) layout. This formalism separates form and content, making it easy to change the look of a page without affecting its content or overall structure. Although I recommend seeing the current redesign through to the end, you should insist in a future iteration on a pure CSS design. This will make it possible to radically refresh the aesthetic qualities of your website by swapping the style sheets without changing the main HTML markup. For an example of the design flexibility afforded by CSS, take a look at the CSS Zen Garden. Notice that as the page goes through a drastic visual change with each new style sheet, the HTML itself remains the same. Thus, contributing designers can post a new style sheet without ever touching the content of the site. CSS Zen Garden http://www.csszengarden.com/ You mention your doubts about the technology you have chosen for your site. I would like to reassure you that you have made an excellent decision in building your site on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This is a well-known combination, usually called by the acronym LAMP, that offers low cost and top performance. There is absolutely no reason to regret LAMP as your choice of web platform. PHP is as fast as Perl when it comes to generating web content, and Linux is a very stable, highly secure operating system. The design of the admin panels and an eventual CSS redesign can be carried out without reference to the underlying web platform, since hosting is separate from design. You ask about the design of the admin panels, but it is difficult for me to judge their adequacy since they exist only in skeletal form as of yet. I find nothing objectionable in what I have seen so far. Anyway, the important thing about web panels is not their design appeal but their functionality. What matters to the administrator is that he be able to manage the back end of the website on a daily basis with a minimum of fuss, and not whether the accompanying graphics are pretty enough. A good admin panel should above all be simple in its design, free of clutter, even minimalistic. Nothing I have seen so far leads me to believe that your current design team is proceeding otherwise. You include in the text of your question a letter from someone who states that he has just the thing for you. After reviewing his sample sites, I conclude that his claims are deeply dubious. He says a great deal about his "careful study of this business industry", his "extensive research", and about how he "carefully implemented every function" to make a "very flexible package", but the results are far from impressive. There is certainly no sign of flexibility when his three sites look very much alike in their essential features, differing mainly in their choice of graphics and fonts. Compare these two listing pages, for example. Note that both are ugly. http://www.meetcontractors.com/posted_project_list.php?pid=1 http://www.outsource4biotech.com/posted_project_list.php?pid=10 Or consider these two top-level category tables. http://www.outsource4biotech.com/ http://www.rolancers.com/default.php Is that meant to be a cutting-edge interface? How is anyone supposed to browse those mammoth overlapping taxonomies, anyway? This kind of interface design was considered clunky five years ago. I think you can discount this fellow's claims and promises purely on the basis of the incompetent designs he offers as testament to the quality of his work. Each home page has some pretty graphics, but as soon as you start clicking deeper into the site, you come to see how little substance there is to it. The fact that he bundles his script with "Sales Tips from top gurus" and future benefits from his "spending a lot of dollars on research" inspires no confidence at all. My advice: avoid. I urge you in general to steer clear of hucksters while you are undergoing a site redesign. For the time being, just get this job done. Later on, you can look back and ask yourself whether it was the right decision. You should not hesitate in midcourse. In any case, I don't think you'll be deeply disappointed. Your current team seems to know what they're doing. Regards, leapinglizard