World Wide Freelancer has been a work in progress for some time, but I never could have pulled this off alone.
Apart from the users of this website - freelancers who have signed up for their own free accounts to post their resumes, woo potential clients and show off their past assignments - many others have helped to put it all together into a working model.
WordPress Mu and Their Forums Win My Heart
First of all I need to thank Wordpress and the team. Without allowing the Wordpress Mu version to be used globally I would have had a nightmare on my hands trying to set up user blogs for all the freelancers of the world.
The team - those at WordPress who spend hours writing plugins for us, answering our questions in the forum and providing documentation on the program - deserve special thanks. Even though I didn’t personally ask questions or request support, I did my share of reading the forums to get answers to my programming troubles. Besides being helpful, forum moderators are a great source of amusement with their pithy replies to some of the posters.
Best Host Comes Through Again
Next, my hat is off to HostGator’s tech team. These are the people who I drove crazy all week with my issues and questions and needs. Everyone said it couldn’t be done - hosting WordPress Mu through a shared account on an ‘add on domain’ (not a VPS) - but the Hostgator Techs made it possible. Not without, I might imagine, a little bit of cussing and swearing when I wasn’t in the room. I’m one of the world’s most demanding customers - but I had a vision and that vision was to help more freelancers find the work and get the exposure they deserve online. Thank you Hostgator, once again.
We beta-launch on this 15th day of November, 2007. I won’t smash the champagne bottle on my laptop, but I may have a few glasses of wine tonight!
Beta Launch and One Template
Beta launch begins with just one template. Inspired by the AjaxBerlee template, which in turn was inspired by Brajeshwar, or Nico something. (Guys if you need me to rewrite this drop me a note! I’m sorry, I’ve already hacked out the info.)
Speaking of ‘hacking’. That is precisely what had to happen to get this site and this template to jive with each other. I’m sure I could have hacked to keep all functions, but I’m no programmer. Instead I hacked to remove all functions that caused errors site wide.
More Templates Coming
More templates will be coming for users of World Wide Freelancers, so sign up and sit tight. My goal was to begin with the generic template and weekly release different templates to appeal to different types of freelancers. There will be a ‘writers’ template, an ‘artists’ template, a ‘marketing consultant’ template. And yes, you will get to choose which one you want to use - you are not stuck to one based on your target market.
Sign Up, Sit Down, and Hold On
There will be lots more coming. You need to know you have a voice with what goes on at World Wide Freelancer. I built this for you. Leave your comments, suggestions, ideas, needs, whatever!, on the site. Even if you want to comment in secret you can leave a fake name and email in your comment - if it is a valid idea I will do my best to incorporate it for all freelancers.
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Notes and links before official launch:
Check for XHTML 1.1 validity.