This was one of our biggest requests from contractors and now we’ve delivered. When you log in to your account, you’ll be able to see the total number of page views your company page has received.
Simple yet effective. Thanks for all the suggestions guys. Keep ‘em coming!
The WorkGrabber team is proud to announce the opening of our WorkGrabber feedback forum. As we’ve mentioned in the past, our goal is to build the most valuable service for our users by constantly incorporating their feedback into WorkGrabber. This feedback forum will serve as a open platform where users can share their ideas and suggestions for features they’d like to see in future releases of WorkGrabber.
That being said, we are currently implementing a “feature-freeze” for our first release. The development team has been hard at work building the inital features into WorkGrabber which explains why the first deployment has taken so long. Every idea we come up with delays the release just a little bit. The feature freeze just allows us to say “This is what the first release will contain”.
As soon as we deploy our first release, we will get right back to developing the features you’ll see in the next release. We expect our feedback forum to be the main “feature backlog” that guides our development efforts. Our goal is to deploy a new version of WorkGrabber every 3-4 weeks. Of course, this demanding release schedule will become more and more consistent after the first few iterations as we get better at streamlining our develoment, testing, and deploying processes.
So - if you have any suggestions, requests or features you would like to see in WorkGrabber, hop over to the WorkGrabber feedback forum and make yourself heard!
It’s the details that get ya. Here is our current logo draft for the site. Let us know what you think.
I can’t remember if it was in a book I read or a quote I ran into on the blogosphere, but I must admit it has proven to be a great philosophy for guiding our website design.
“If your users need to read a manual on how to use your site, its too complicated!”
Our design team is really striving to make WorkGrabber as straightforward and easy to use as possible. Unfortunately, sometimes we have a bunch of computer programmers deciding on whats “easy”. The way I see it, every link, every button, every navigation should make it’s goal extremely obvious. Tonight I wanted to throw out an intial “sneak peek” at what our (overly?) simplistic menu design will look like for an individual job:
If you already have a pre-pre-alpha invite (yes, we’re really calling it that), then you recognize this. There’s alot more on the page and we’ve gotten some feedback on what its missing and what was a little too much (thanks Alf!). As long as its satisfying your needs and you don’t have to think about “how do I…”, then we’re happy! If we need to explain how to work our site, then we’ve failed!
UPDATE: Thanks for all the interest and sorry for not posting this on the original post. If you’re a contractor and want to get one of our “pre-pre-alpha invites”, just send an email to “ppalpha@workgrabber.com” with your info. We’d love to hear from you!
When posting a job, customers are required to provide an email address. The job will not be posted until the user verifies the email address by clicking on a link in the email.
We’ve decided to also use this as a tool to control blatant spammers. We are creating a “blacklisted emails” table that will not allow abusers to post any more jobs. Although this won’t stop all the spam jobs, it should make it more difficult for spammers to post fake job profiles.
We are also looking into a “commuity-driven” blacklisting / spamming feature where contractors can quickly and easily flag jobs as “SPAM” to help keep the community clean. More on this feature in future posts.
This is a simple question which has been delaying some of our development efforts. When a customer submits a job for bidding, should he / she be required to create a username and password the first time?
I know as a user, I hate creating a username / password when I access a site. If its the type of service where I would be logging in daily for an indefinite period “just for fun”, then I can understand the need for creating a full-fledged account. However, I don’t think WorkGrabber will be used like that from a customer’s perspective.
So here’s my reasoning. As a contractor, you will likely be checking the site for new jobs, messages, responses etc. daily. You need a secure username and password. The lifespan of a contractor’s interaction with the site is indefinite.
However, as a customer your lifespan on the site is a lot shorter (unless, of course, your house is falling apart). Once you submit a job, you will be working with contractors until you find the one you want to hire. After that, your job is essentially closed and you won’t be “logging in” to the site until you have a new job to submit. By that time, you would have probably forgotten your password anyways.
To summarize, my thoughts are to provide for a customer’s email address when he/she is posting a new job. This email will be used to send a verification link in an email. When you receive the verification link, clicking on it allows the customer to manage it, view bids, answer questions, etc.