Help: where to find new sub-contract/freelance customers?

Posted by datarazor on June 11, 2015 at 12:44am

Hello Drupal community, I'm looking for more freelance / contract work at the moment. And I was wondering where good places were to find it?

I run my own small agency in Santa Barbara CA and I can offer the following services: Drupal module coding, theming, front-end interactivity, custom design, project management, information architecture and more.

So far I know about Drupal Groups, meet ups, and craigslist. Any other good resources for finding new clients?

Thanks!

Sebastian.

Comments

Contracting Work

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 11, 2015 at 3:46pm

We created http://www.drupalcontractors.com which has relationships with employers and offers devs a free profile like a LinkedIn for Drupal freelancers. check it out there are probably about 120 devs on there or so. Good luck!

Thanks Chris, great tip! I

Posted by datarazor on June 11, 2015 at 5:00pm

Thanks Chris, great tip! I made an account there and applied to a few prospects. Fingers crossed.

BTW: There are some errors on your website though, I presume you are aware of them? If not, I've tried to briefly summarize them below:

It is logging errors to screen instead of just the log and reports something about a mismatched argument. When you click "interested" on a job it writes the message to "admin" instead of to the author [normal?] and when you look through job offers you see all of them in triplicates, in a font that I find a bit hard to read (but maybe that is just me).

--
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Creative-Technical solutions
Beautiful websites built with Drupal
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Salary Range cuts off

Posted by Michael-IDA on June 12, 2015 at 3:54pm

You know some of us make more than $70/hour :)

Drupal Managed Hosting includes Quarterly Updates, Data Migration, ...

70.00 hr

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 4:14pm

Hi Michael,

I am not sure what this comment is in reference to but would love more clarity. I am more than aware of dev rates? How does this apply to this thread I don't see it mentioned anywhere?

Thanks

Chris

Yes the website has price

Posted by datarazor on June 12, 2015 at 4:58pm

Yes the website has price ranges when you sign up as a contractor and they end at $70/h. I have developers I work with that charge $80/h or even $100/h and I've met some that charge over 100. So this drop down is not functional as-is right now...

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Fountain City Inc
Creative-Technical solutions
Beautiful websites built with Drupal
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Rate

Posted by pcher1bw on June 12, 2015 at 5:41pm

I agree with datarazor, you could solve this by adding one more selection which is > $70. Or you could add "Other" which would allow the contractor to state their price in a text field.

Paul Chernick
CEO
Chernick Consulting
(310) 569-2517

Solved w/ Text Field

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 6:41pm

Ok this has been done.

I seriously do not remember putting those values in that select box $6 hr? Who the heck did that? Annyway :) the head spinning world of Drupal. Thanks again datarazor and Paul pcher1bw and others who have provided testing and input. It will be better with your help!

Chris

Awesome !

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 5:43pm

I will fix this right away, I had completely forgotten that was there. The power User Experience testing. I will get this corrected by EOD! Great input yes agreed on all points are you kidding the dev who wrote the Location Module bdragon I believe charges over 300.00 hr :)

Finding contractors

Posted by basscleff94010 on June 12, 2015 at 4:55pm

I tried to use your site to find a contractor. However, the skills you are listing are too generic to facilitate that.

For example, I need someone with Commerce experience, specifically. So tagging the profiles with skills and allowing potential hiring agents to display contractors based on the tags, would be very helpful.

Also, regarding your business model, I have no problem paying your fees if I have know I have reasonable chance of hiring someone with the right skills. However, I won't pay an up front cost, in the hope that one of 120 people will fit my needs. I suspect I am not alone.

thanks for the input

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 5:48pm

We are working on the refinement of tagging. I will say as far as paying the rate. In our experience that would be better than having us double the rate and control the reosource as a contractor (which many do) and or having you pay a 10-30% of annual salary recruiting fee (normally with a choice of say no more than 3 potential skill fits.) so we are pretty confident this is about the most benevolent way to charge for the site. Just as Angies list or any other list of resources, they seem to do ok with it.

We do appreciate the feedback and it is just in its infancy at this point, however again, we just are not aware of any other portal that is doing this at all and has 10 resources listed together nevermind over 100. And we have not really marketed it to the community as we know it is a work in progress.

We use it for our business to connect with resources mainly http://www.celebratedrupal.com and have found a few of our best resources and formed long standing relationships with devs.

Good luck!

Does it work?

Posted by jcolomer on June 11, 2015 at 9:26pm

Hi Cris, thanks for launching that site. I completed the registration, but it does not seem to work. Am I doing something wrong?

Duplicates

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 3:24am

Hi jcolomer I am not sure if you can be more specific let me know. We were having an issue with our job Feed that was creating duplicate posts. We got that cleaned up and hopefully solved the duplicate issue as well. Let me know how else I can be of help. Glad to do it and appreciate any feedback it is a total grass roots effort.

Hi Chris, thanks for the

Posted by jcolomer on June 12, 2015 at 5:34pm

Hi Chris, thanks for the quick reply. Well, I just filled the registration form, clicked on the submit button and was taken back to the login page, but to my surprise I was not logged in nor my user was recognized. How do you recommend to proceed?

Investigating

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 5:50pm

Hi J

I will have to investigate, I have not had any other reports of this as of yet. There is a module handling redirects to the proper home page for your account, seems it is not delivering :) in your case. I will get back asap.

Thanks

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 3:25am

Also Datarazor thanks again for pointing out the duplicates to us!

The site could use some UI/UX

Posted by greta_drupal on June 12, 2015 at 4:27pm

The site could use some UI/UX love. The "summary" / "skills & experience" is a big ugly mess without the option for format. How about some basic input filters there.

Unless you mean this to be strictly for Module Developers -- which you must not because you have a "content manager" option -- why not include a few other disciplines and break out more with a multi-select:

Sitebuilder
Themer
UI/UX
Front-end Developer
Backend Developer

"Developer" is too broad. I consider myself a developer (UI/UX, themer, advanced sitebuilder, admin) but I am not a module programmer. We have value too! (Although employers/clients tend to dismiss that.)

Residency

Posted by greta_drupal on June 12, 2015 at 4:22pm

Also, the residency selection will be confusing for employers looking at contractors. Perhaps at least an additional text field for one to enter their country of residence.

Thanks Greta!

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 4:59pm

It needs SOOOO much :)

These are great points and please keep em coming as you can. We are doing our best in spare time to make it useful for devs / employers. This has really been a useful thread so far really appreciate it again Greta! We just love being part of this community!

If you'd like some UI/UX

Posted by greta_drupal on June 12, 2015 at 5:07pm

If you'd like some UI/UX help, I will volunteer a few hours. I have it to spare right now. (I could have fixed those issues in less time that it took me to report them. wink ...No, really.)

Rate Range -- Below minimum wage? Seriously?

Posted by greta_drupal on June 12, 2015 at 5:05pm

The biggest issue is your showing a rate of $6/hr. --> below the federal minimum wage!! Frankly, I doubt that is even legal. I hope this is a typo. Moreover, showing those unreasonably low rates makes the "normal" rates look very high in comparison.

In my professional and ethical opinion, you should not have a rate range below $25/hr. As is, you are promoting this site for hiring Drupal DEVELOPERS. IMO, no developer should work for less than $25-30/hr., and that being for nonprofits. And, I agree with Michael-Inet, $70/hr. is too low a high end. I'd expect to pay that for any programming developer.

Let's ELEVATE each other rather than depress each other. Set a reasonable standard. Educate employers and clients. Suggesting that you can hire a Drupal professional for minimum wage does not serve the community well.

Also, the site as-is is USA-centric. If that is your intended niche, perhaps clearly state that in the masthead (sitename). If not, perhaps use the help text to designate that rates are based on US dollar, and that citizenship question is re: USA.

Good start. #CarryOn

Huh?

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 6:28pm

Shoot I agree of course! That is our whole intention I don't promote anything like that. Lets get that rate range out of there asap :) and just put a text box I would think in hindsight would be best.

6$ an hour? Must be a typo or something! Yes greta please please help :) if you would email me at cmcgrath@celebratedrupal.com I can get you access.

Thanks, Thanks and a 1000 more.

A few more suggestions: JOBS form

Posted by greta_drupal on June 12, 2015 at 5:25pm

You definitely will need some Views exposed filters, for all categories (contractors, employers, jobs). Even now, it is unwieldy.

Add a taxonomy for project duration: Example: staff, short-term contract, long-term contract, bounty

Add that to the JOBS.

JOBS form also needs a rate range or budget range. Else, you are wasting our time. If you are asking developers to specify a rate range, you must as that of employers too.

Add the Scheduler module https://www.drupal.org/project/scheduler and enable for JOBS posts.
Auto expire job posts after X days, with option for poster to extend (by simply changing the unpublish date manually on node). Also, encourage -- through form text -- posters to UNPUBLISH their job posts once they have hired.

JOBS FORM: Need a field for whether work can be done remotely or onsite location. Needs to be an exposed filter field. In fact, even add "remote" to the Location field option.

Make this post sticky:

"READ THIS FIRST: Recommendations for hiring a Drupal site developer"

Captcha?

Posted by pcher1bw on June 12, 2015 at 5:35pm

I'm curious, why aren't you using mollom or some other form of captcha rather than simple arithmetic? It's quite possible to write a robot to provide the correct answer.

Paul Chernick
CEO
Chernick Consulting
(310) 569-2517

We could switch it

Posted by Chris McGrath on June 12, 2015 at 6:29pm

I was not aware of that thanks for the tip!

Infos

Posted by JJDurant on June 16, 2015 at 9:59am

Hi, me and my team can be interested in your project, we are in France, Paris, and we use to work with Drupal. Contact me if you want. .

MichelD

Hi JJDurant

Posted by datarazor on September 13, 2017 at 7:38pm

Hi JJDurant, got a portfolio I can look at? I'm looking for a themer. Thanks!

--
Fountain City Inc
Creative-Technical solutions
Beautiful websites built with Drupal
http://fountaincity.tech

Site down?

Posted by datarazor on September 13, 2017 at 7:42pm

Looks like http://www.drupalcontractors.com is down?

Now we are the ones looking for contractors, rather than looking for work :p brought me back here but site doesn't seem to work anymore? Gives errors.

--
Fountain City Inc
Creative-Technical solutions
Beautiful websites built with Drupal
http://fountaincity.tech

It is not down, you just need

Posted by irinaz on September 13, 2017 at 7:59pm

It is not down, you just need to click on "proceed" to get to insecure http vs https connection.

if you do any search it then

Posted by datarazor on September 20, 2017 at 2:55pm

if you do any search it then throws more errors, the site clearly has problems.

--
Fountain City Inc
Creative-Technical solutions
Beautiful websites built with Drupal
http://fountaincity.tech

Help: where to find new sub-contract/freelance customers?

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