Drupal optimization ninja, experienced with ecommerce, and ideally navigation guru! Facebook a plus... | projectstars inc.

Introduction

projectstars is a new business network which gives experts the chance to show off their experience, network, and find work. Consisting of 300 enterprise communities, we are the first business network to be giving stock to our members in a 'Blog for Stock' event where every three months the top 100 projectstars receive shares in projectstars inc..

Our requirements

We now have an immediate requirement for a Drupal optimization ninja, experienced with ecommerce, and ideally navigation guru! Any Facebook app development experience is a plus. This is a fantastic opportunity to join in the development of a fast-growing, pre-funding startup (we are self-funded so far), and are looking for someone who can not only do the work but also believe in the site itself and it's purpose and place. As well as the requirements detailed below, we also want someone who would like to work with us on an ongoing basis as we don't plan on stopping improving the site any time soon. We have some cool ideas for where we want to go, and we now need to partner up with a drupal ninja to make sure we actualize those ideas.

About our project

Launched into invitation-only beta on 1 Oct 2007, projectstars.com has already attracted over 400 members and created a lot of buzz in the recruiting industry. Our goal is being a fun place to network and do business, and we are positioning ourselves as a hybrid of job sites like Monster.com/Dice.com and networking sites like LinkedIn/XING/Facebook, with a little bit of X Factor and Pop Idol thrown in.

Points are awarded for votes on content submitted (10pts per vote), invites to the network (100pts per successful invite), and for projects (100pts per star for posting, 10,000pts per star for obtaining a star project). The top 100 accumulators of the most points in every three month period receive stock in projectstars inc., ranging from 100 shares for the overall winner to 5 shares for the 100th position.

Currently anything can be put on a resume but proof is not readily available - similarly the level of expertise required for an advertised project is often not immediately obvious. Our star rating system for projects, coupled with our points system over time will make it easy for both recruiter and candidate to see which projects and projectstars are suitable for each other.

What we need

Based on feedback from our first few weeks, we now need to tighten up our proposition and achieve the following ideally by November 1st when we plan on taking the site out of beta:

• Fix site speed - first and foremost we need help specifying better hosting and optimizing the site for speed (we use cached blocks and memcache at the moment)
• Implement Pay-per-node - currently job/project postings are free. From 1 Nov they will be paid for and we need to implement the pay-per-node module. Payment is by PayPal, and we will also be offering volume discounts which needs to be addressed, but can be done manually until we implement an automated solution. Project posts expire after 30 days, and currently points are removed if a project post is deleted - we need to fix this and make sure points aren't taken away when the post expires. We therefore need someone experienced with the ecommerce, vote up/down, and voting api modules as have had no success in getting this working so far and understand there are many issues with the ecommerce module
• Community subscription and navigation - when people join the site, the first thing they want to do is subscribe to communities. At the moment they do this through the og/all page however there is a new module OG Subscriber Management which we want to customize so that it presents a DHTML-style menu with checkboxes so managing your community subscriptions is a whole lot easier and faster
• Improve/simplify top menu and communities menu - ideally the person we hire will be experienced at navigational design, however we will bring in outside help from an expert if they're not
• Re-shuffle the design of the site - we are working with an excellent designer and will need to some re-shuffling of the design so it's easier to use and so it looks less like it's built by techies for use by non-techies. What we are trying to do is very simple, however the site is currently complex. We need to improve our 'funnel' so people have a path to follow from visiting to joining to involving themselves in the community. In addition, we need more people to understand that they need to post blogs and vote on other peoples content in order to get votes on theirs. We need it to be as easy to understand and use as something like hotornot, and as profile-friendly as MySpace and Facebook. We need to make the homepage simpler, and profiles more pretty.
• Enable anti-spam - when we take the site out of beta we will be opening the site up to the public at large. We therefore need to make sure we guard as much as possible against spam so need someone to set up the appropriate anti-spam and captcha modules
• Facebook app - as well as wanting to reach a larger audience, being able to show off your star rating (your net worth) and latest business blogs on your profile will help provide Facebook users with a business-focused app they are so desperately looking for. We've made a start but really need someone to take over development of this once all the above points are achieved. This is something we would like to achieve as a widget for other sites too, so people can have 'portable profiles'

We had a lot of success from posting for a designer here as we are now working with Mark Elster who made our site look awesome, so we are hoping we will have similar success in our hunt for a drupal ninja!

Contact details

If you are interested, please contact me with details of prior work, any contributions to the drupal community you've made, your availability and your rates. Location is not important - our team is in Canada, UK, and SF and the company itself is based offshore in the British Virgin Islands.