We are migrating our database to a larger and faster server.  We will post an update here when the website is available again.

Thanks.

Bid Commenting!

This was the most requested feature since our beta release.  When a contractor bids on your job, the customer often needs some more clarification before he or she feels comfortable accepting the bid.  Sometimes, contractors also need a little more information before they can estimate the job.

Bid comments allow the customer and contractor to interact and have a conversation right from the bid page.  Contractors and customers are notified when a new comment is made.

Allow HTML tags in the “Special Offers” section

Based on how contractors are using some of our features, we decided to expand the “Special Offers” section.  Contractors often want to “spice up” their coupons or even provide a link to an existing coupon image.  To accomplish this, we now allow HTML tags in the special offers page.  In the near future, we’ll be providing a rich client to format your offer without having to know HTML.

Navigation changes

We did some minor changes to the navigation on the top of the site to make it a little big clearer what the goal is.  Some of our users were getting confused with where to go to post a job, find a contractor or view jobs.

Improved validation when submitting bids

We added some client-side validation for when contractors submit bids to make sure all the required fields are inserted.

Improved error handling when uploading images that are too big

Some of our contractors were having issues uploading large images.  We can now handle images up to 4 MB.

There’s quite a few updates on this release and we hope to continue improving our site based on your feedback.  If you have comments or suggestions, let us know.  We are already working on new features for the next release.

Several customers had some complaints about the job posting form.  Previously, we had an “autocomplete” input box where, as you typed, suggestions would appear for the category you were looking for.  Although there was a certain “cool factor” about it, it really wasn’t very user friendly.  We’ve changed this to use a neat category navigator that makes finding your category much easier.

Another feature we’re rolling out is the ability to “tag” jobs.  Tagging is a simple concept to help us better categorize customer jobs.  For example, if you have a job under the general category “Plumbing”, you might want to tag it with more specific keywords like “toilet repair” and “drain blockage”.  As you type the tag, you’ll be presented with simliar tags which you can click on to select or just add your own.

We hope you enjoy the new job posting form and, as always, we look forward to your feedback!

Simple yet effective.  Thanks for all the suggestions guys.  Keep ‘em coming!

Free Trial (3 months): PAJEMB

• Create job alerts - Contractors can now create “job alerts” from their profiles.  Just enter your current location and the radius you want to cover and we’ll send you alerts when new jobs that match you profile are submitted.  You can choose to send these notifications to your email, cell phone or both.
• Unlimited category inclusion - Contractors select the categories of work they can provide.  This lets you customize which jobs your notified about and which sections of the site your profile appears on.
• Create unlimited photo galleries - We know contractors love to show off their work, and customers like to see examples of their handywork.  That’s why we provide our contractors with unlimited photo galleries.  Create a single gallery or create multiple galleries for every job you do.
• Create unlimited special offers - If you have any discounts or special offers for your customers, you can advertise them through your profile.  Offers are completely customizable.
• Submit contractor reviews - Our built in referal and review program allows customers to rate their overall experience working with the contractor.
• Upload project photos - Our goal with WorkGrabber is to bring the project directly to the contractor’s internet browser.  Uploading photos that help describe your project our a great way of doing that.  Give potential contractors a sense for the scope of work before they even need to visit your location.
• Upload project videos - This feature is great for when you need to demonstrate the issue.  Ever tried to describe the sound an appliance is making over the phone or email?  Now you don’t have to, just record and upload it.  We currently intergrate with YouTube as our video provider.
• Interact with job questions & answers - Jobs now have a section for Q&A between the customer and contractors.  Contractors can ask clarification questions to make sure they understand your project.
• Integrated direct website linking - We’ve seen similar sites try to hide the fact that their contractors have a website.  Not us.  We provide redirects to your site directly from your profile page.
• More contractor attributes - Contractors can now specify their payment and language options.

And much more!  Remember, we are always looking for feedback and fresh ideas to add to the site.

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 pretty clear to see the reason these sites do this.  It’s not in their best interest for potential customers (leads) to just browse on over to a contractor’s site and contact him directly.  These sites need the customer to make a request through their site so they can charge the contractors for the lead.

That’s definitely not our intention with WorkGrabber.  In fact, we’re adopting quite the opposite approach.  Nothing could make us happier than a customer coming through WorkGrabber.com, leaving to your site and posting a lead directly with you.  Even better would be if that customer never returns to WorkGrabber to look for another roofing contractor and you’ve gained a lifelong customer.  Other sites need the request to be submitted through their own site so they can charge the contractor for the lead.  These companies need to start understanding that their success is based on how successful their customers are, even if it means missing a lead sale.