A Rescue Job for Little Money or Please Help Me to Choose an Overseas Developer on Elance.

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skippydoodle's picture

I have a partially complete Drupal site that I can't use yet. I'm about to go back on Elance and post this job again.

"This assignment involves a few bug fixes, site updates, maintenance, adding features and functionality to our web site www.theartbeacon.com. Most important, it needs to be functioning.

The site is built using Drupal Commons/7. This is the first of many assignments for this site and others. This first one project is small, but it is urgent and is mostly focused on getting the bugs fixed and the basic site working smoothly. I have an ongoing need for someone who can create APIs and add functionality such as an invoicing system and an inventory management system and to develop smaller, less complicated web sites for my clients. I have a small budget for this first project, but it is urgent. I'm looking for someone I can depend on for the long term, but who can help immediately."

The Back Story

About a year ago I started a business (a one-stop shop for professional artists to inventory their images, bios, sell originals, prints and use as a dashboard for social networking). I have basic HTML and CSS experience, but only for static sites (I'd apparently been in a cave for nearly a decade). I had a shoestring budget of a few thousand dollars. So I started playing around with drop and drag systems and soon realized that I needed more. I started learning Wordpress and it was okay for basic layout, but finding the right modules to work together without spending a fortune each month was proving difficult. I read about Elance and proceeded to hire a very nice young team in Bangladesh to help me. Communication was difficult and it seemed that they were programming everything anew, so after awhile, it still wasn't going where I wanted it to go. I scrapped that and started reading up on Drupal.

Drupal was overwhelming to me, but it fascinated me and I love the concept of open source, the community that goes along with it and knowing that contributing whatever I could might help others. I attended one of your monthly group meetings when I was still in the planning stage and was welcomed to the group and met with encouragement. So I left the meeting ready to take a few weeks to study and learn Drupal.

I studied just long enough to realize that without learning PHP and MySQL I wasn't going anywhere. So I found a Drupal developer just out of school looking to

make his mark. He agreed to work at a very low rate until the site was functional. We worked hard and learned a lot. In December, he fell ill and he had to

take care of his mother. He had to stop working on the site and go back to his old job, but he was kind enough to set up a limited admin account so I could

allow potential developers to look under the hood to see what was done and what still needed to be done. I was nearly out of money, so the site just sat there and I started doing workshops and consulting for a few of my clients to try to catch up financially.

A few weeks ago, I was nearly caught up on my bills so I ventured back to Elance and found a company in India that would work cheap to get me up

and running. As you can imagine, that was a disaster. I think their knowledge of English was limited to Google Translate. They told me that I had over 400

modules running and it was making the site run slowly. They sent me a spreadsheet of all of those modules and I had no idea which ones were essential and which

were not. Communications proved to be impossible. I'm back to having a site that is nearly functional enough, but not quite. No one is maintaining

it and I'm afraid to touch it (I would break it).

I can afford maayyybe a few hundred dollars to get the site functional, and once the artists start paying their monthly subscription fees through the system I

will be able to afford a regular number of hours for development each month. I have several clients who have been my beta testers/guinea pigs since last fall.

They are patient, but it has gotten downright embarrassing. I also have a list of other clients who are ready and willing to sign up as soon as the site is

functional.

I just need to get it functional. I am about to run to Elance again and gamble on another shot in the dark. I could use some advice and guidance. I'd be willing to work with a student or someone without a lot of experience if they are resourceful and willing to initially work for peanuts. All I can offer in return is a small amount of cash, a boat load of gratitude and a sincere promise of loyalty once the artists are paying through the system.

If you are still reading (thank you) and have some curiosity, you can login as a limited admin on the site: You can log in as a limited administrator to look around and see how the site is set up. Here is the login info:

• Email: limited_admin@theartbeacon.com
• Username: Limited Administrator
• Password: test

St. Louis

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