Nerdlance News

The Story Behind the Site

Hello, My name is Dustin Davis. I’m a nerd and I’m a freelancer! Okay, so maybe I don’t resemble the clip-art on the site (thanks to Hassle Free Clip Art.com by the way). But my wife is always calling me a nerd. In fact, when anyone asks her what I do for a living (she has no idea really), she just says “He’s a computer nerd.” And to be honest, I couldn’t be more flattered.

This site started to fulfill a collge internet programming final. I’d been considering writing my own freelance portal for a while, but each time I thought about EVERYTHING I would have to do to it, I didn’t really want to get in to the project. The school assignment finally gave me a reason to jump in to it.

I have used a number of other freelance portals so you may notice similarities with many or all of them since they essentially do the same thing. My favorite freelance portal to use was GetAFreelancer.com (affectionately known as GAF) mainly due to its simplicity. So if you are a GAF user, you may notice many similarities to their site.

I found myself submitting many emails to them to fix bugs and processes on their site. I’m glad to say that in time, they have updated many things and listened to my request. One request they did not listen to was to let me pay $10.00 for my gold membership (as advertised) rather than paying $10.61 ($10.00 + $0.61 for PayPal fees). To this day, you are responsible for fees whether you are depositing money or paying for their fees. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying fees to support their site and service, but for some reason, the $0.61 just drove me nuts. I guess I’m just anal this way, but if I’m paying you, and you accept PayPal, you should eat the fees! So that was my first “to do” item when building this site.

There are other fee issues that got to me as well. I think the percentage based fees are fair as well. But what bugged me was that if I wasn’t really actively looking for work and just wanted to do a small project for $30, I would pay the 10% fee of $3 for winning the bid. But what I won four bids for $30 within the month? I would pay $12 in fees. I understand the “gamble” of doing things this way so I’m not terribly irked. What got to me was when I would win a bigger project for say $150 and then accepted only to find out that without warning, I just payed a $15 fee. Gadzooks! I could have had all my possible fees waived for the rest of the month for $5 less. So “to do” item number 2 was to let users know BEFORE accepting projects what their fees will be. Getting all this figured out was sometimes more complicated than I first thought it would be. But I think you’ll be happy with these changes.

There are a number of other items that I felt needed improvement. I won’t go into all of them here, but may blog (or brag) about them in the future.

So to make a long story short, I worked throughout the semester and beyond to complete the site. All in all it took me about 8 months to get it to the point where I was willing to tell people to come join. I’m happy to say that it is not complete! But it is fully functional. You should be happy to hear that it is not complete either because it seems like a site like this will always be a work in progress. I’m always happy to hear what you like about the site and what you would like to see improved. I will do my best to make those improvements. If I can’t do it, or I don’t have time to do it, maybe I’ll just hire you to do it, or post the project here and let someone who DOES know how do it. Either way, if we agree it should be done, let’s find a way to get it done.

So thanks for your support. I hope to continue to improve upon the site with your suggestions. Freelance forever nerds!

Dustin