Unexpected elance setbacks

[gward]

I am looking for someone to set up my website. I registered on elance.com, got my credit card set up and posted the following message on elance for help. This was back on July 13th:

I am exploring the concept of an online site that can
be used to do the following:
-promote business for a small business venture
-collect revenue through paypal
-accomodate blogs, discussion forums and message boards

I am already registered with paypal. I have
material to upload to the site. It is a relatively simple
site.

The Web developer should be able to upload the site with all my material in 1 day. The site needs to be able to be accessed through 2 domain names (a main domain name and a link domain name).

I would like to get a price quote on this....

I invited 15 bidders from the online website development list. The concept is simple and I don't think it would take more than 1-2 hours to set up (I suggested the expected time frame).
I tried to focus my bidding selections on the companies that were creative and the most reasonable in price (the lowest rate I found was $2/ hour).

I received 2 invitation declines so far (one company cited the small size of the project). The others have not responded. Bidding ends tomorrow.

I am at a loss. Is there anything I could have done differently :confused: ?
All suggestions welcome...

[JSimpson]

I don't think an hour or two is a reasonable time frame. Setting up a blog takes time and access to a database, unless you use a straight template from blogger to typepad I'd expect that alone to take a while. If all you want for "revenue through paypal" is a button that's simple and is just a link and an image.

Discussion forums and message boards are generally the same thing, and would take a few hours to set up on your domain. I'd expect it to take 10-15 hours.

Also if I had been a provider and looked at your request and amount of time I would have put your request in the 20% of the 80-20 split and not bothered. Your request sounds like your trying to be limit your exspenses which makes sense, but you don't want it to come across that way. Also try explaining in better detail what needs to be done exactly.

For example, is your site currently straight from a designer in a .psd format that still needs to be sliced and layed out including CSS and browser compatability. What exactly do you mean by accepting money through paypal? Do you intend for the message boards to be hosted at your domain, does it need to be skinned to look similar to your site or at least match in colors?

If you explain things along those lines you'll instill confidence that you know what your doing and will be easy to work with, not a potential hassle with only a little bit of cash to throw around. Also even if you don't have the need for follow up work, offhandedly mention the possiblity. Just some thoughts...

[wildsoul]

ditto to JSimpson's reply. Your 1-2 hour timeframe seems impossible.
Have you ever done any website building yourself?
How did you base your time estimation?

[gward]

Thank you so much for the feedback. It is greatly appreciated. No, windsoul, I don't have any experience in website building. This area is totally new to me :o :o :o It is all a work in progress and I am looking to gain as much knowledge and insight as possible on forums such as this one and others.

A friend had suggested the 2 hour timeframe.... I guess in this case it was the blind leading the blind :rolleyes: !

Thanks again for the enlightening feedback...

[Peter Bowen]

I've had generally good work with elance - 6 projects so far.

I think you've got to know a little about what you're doing if you're going to play on the web for a living - don't do your own coding but for simple things like a website - just so that you know what questions to ask.

None of what you're asking is too difficult but why don't you use a template site? I built mine using rapidweaver template. It's not too fancy but it's making money and it only took a couple of hours (after writing the text)

The blog and wiki were included in my hosting package and they didn't take long to set up - but I've left them fairly standard for now

Cheers

Pete

[searstower]

Gward,

You need to have a LOT more detail in here about what you want. I'll bet that the reason you are getting so few bids is that the project description is so nebulous (do you need to have the blog and forum set up? or do you just need to build a site that will accommodate them in the future?) that no one feels comfortable putting out a bid that they will be held to later.

You need to specify a few things.

1- Is a template design ok?
2- How is your content prepared? HTML or text? Do you have any graphics that need to be edited or cut down to size (1-30k) for the web?
3- Does the blog/forum need to be set up in this phase of the project, or just built with that in mind for later?
4- Do you already have the domain names & hosting? If not, that will be a separate charge you, as the website owner, will have to pay, right?

If you just wanted a few pages of text/pictures with a templated design, a simple blog and the ABILITY to have forums set up, that would be the easiest to set up and depending on the host and tools they use and how much you want to tweak it, that actually could be done in a few hours.

That would be an ideal site to start testing your product idea, and it could grow into something else later if the test works out.

Something like that I would probably charge about $150 USD.

The other thing you'll need to keep in mind is when you want to make the Paypal buttons, you probably don't want to give them the access code to your Paypal account, but they can very easily walk you through creating the button and have you send them the HTML code.

Hope you've found something!
Rebecca