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Well, I would have liked to purchase another license of your great software.  I even went so far as dropped the $20 to post the job on the job forum.  But I received not one response.  And personally, I think the job sounds pretty interesting.  Looks like I’ll end up getting it done by hand or in Wordpress. Someone is anxious to do it in WP for me so I guess I’ll give it a shot.

Is there something wrong with what I posted?
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/66912/

Just thought you’d be interested in knowing since $20 is obviously way to high a price for this service.  In fact, smart marketing would dictate that there be no charge, so as to encourage more jobs to be posted which would in turn create more EE license sales revenue.

slobizman, I don’t think the lack of response is indicative of anything about Ellis Lab or ExpressionEngine. It could just be that this time of year is very hectic for freelancers (not to mention, in general) or that your project was simply not interesting to those that viewed it.

There was nothing “wrong” with the project from what I could tell (except the budget seemed low, but you clarified that later on). Perhaps the pool of available EE developers who can design well, know EE and can get in the guts of EE and customize it, is limited.

Just some thoughts. 😊

As for the budget, I placed this comment in the job post:

“Additional Comments:
I hate specifying budgets, so ignore my budget I was forced to enter.  As a former programmer and current owner of other developed sites, I can judge if the price you quote is fair after we discuss the project together more. We may end up with something more simple or more complex than I could state here.

This is not a request for a quote from this description. That would be impossible to do without further discussion.  It is a request for an introduction from interested parties. Please tell you your thoughts and questions on the project, and your portfolio page so I can see your work.”

Asking for a budget isn’t a good thing.  If you are a non-EE developer, you really don’t have an idea of a budget.  In my case I had no budget, but you didn’t have that option.  Human nature tells me that if I instead chose $5 - $10K, I would get a bid in that range even if someone would have done it for $4,000 had I not picked a lower budget.  I’m not that stupid to ask for premium rates.  A proper budget for me would have been $2500 - $10,000.  I’ve got plenty of funds to pay for a job if the job is worth it; I wouldn’t care if I spent $100,000 for a job if it was worth it (not this one), but I have no idea exactly what the developer would propose to me until I talked with him.  I also would have to judge the quality of the developer.

You really should take off the budget criteria. And as a businessman, I really really recommend—if you’d like to make more money—to remove the fee for posting a job. It’s peanuts compared to what you can make on licenses.  Of course, you’re going to need to find more people interested in developing projects for people.

(For anyone out there listening who might now be interested in the project, I’m no longer interested.  I’ve got a great programming group that is excellent and anxious to do it for me without EE.)

It looks like an interesting project to me, but I suspect this may be a rough time of year.  I know I’m just trying to finish off my outstanding stuff and take a week off for the holidays.

I’d give it a little time.  And I’ll be sure to give the crew a ‘heads up’ on the budget issue.  Though in truth, I suspect most developers would read the full post and realize the budget is negotiable.  It seemed very clear to me in my read through.  And definitely something doable in EE with a little custom work.  But it’s just a rough time of year, I suspect.

I’d agree with slobizman on the budget requirement on the job board posting being made non-mandatory (or a ‘don’t know’ category being added).

I have two postings on the job board at the moment, and I frankly have no idea what the final budget should be - in fact, agreeing the scope of work (and the resulting fee) is the first thing I’d want to do with the designer. But the current configuration of the posting doesn’t give that option.

Slobizman’s ‘additional comments’ (posting above) says it perfectly.

I should say that I don’t have any problem with the $20 posting fee. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Les

We charge a fee to prevent people who aren’t serious about the job from posting. If you’ve ever viewed a “free” job board you’ll more than likely find its full of worthless job offers, tons of spam, and people looking for cheap work, not good work. The $20 fee prevents all that at a very small and reasonable price. We don’t have the job board to sell more licenses or to earn money from the postings. We have a job board to help people connect with professionals. Nothing more, nothing less. Charging a fee to keep the riff-raff out increases the chances of a quality connection between developer and client.

And yes, December is a pretty difficult time to line up professional work. Most developers are typically swamped trying to finish out projects before the new year.

Best to you with the solution you did find. I hope it works out and have a great holiday.

Thread closed.