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Seeking Developer / Reviewer
#1

Aloha,

Apologies for the dissertation format of this post, but hopefully, with all the information, someone will understand, step up and guide us.

We are seeking an honest Developer who will take the time to give us an honest review of what we currently have. We do know it is desktop, laptop, notebook and smart phone friendly. From what I have been told, the last Developer used CI with MVC Frameworks and Bootstrap 3.3.5.

Website Overview : PlatZinum
1. Membership / Subscription Website using PayPal, no eCommerce.
1a. Members have MCP, but there is no format and everything you type there is shown in the Member Database.

1a. You can register, I think? The format is basically empty, and goes no where when completed. 
2b. No popup Free to Subscribe window added yet.

2. Five Interactive / Facebook Formatted Journals (Blogs) for five Life Coaches (topics only created by the Life Coaches) with Interactive Comment / Quick Reply / Likes. 
2a, Each Coach has categories, and in each category there are sub-categories. Journals (menu)
2b. This step is redundant and removed. Redundant Step
2c. New Topic section. New Topic Step

3. Media Section for radio show and podcasts. Empty html page created, but not connected.
4. Moderated eCalendar. Empty html page created, but not connected.

5. eMporium is only for our affiliates, where a member is linked directly to their websites. 
5a. Our Programs are only linked to our eMail addresses. 
5b. No Commerce is sold or fulfilled within the site.

Website History : We are beginning to wonder if this site is even possible?
I. October 2014 : we hired a company. 
a. We paid 50% down to start our new interactive site.
b. They finished the site, but required the balance prior to releasing the site to us.
c. The site was horribly planned regardless the numerous eMail of Flow Charts, Design Requirements, instructions, edits needed, etc. 
d. We had it reviewed. That developer wanted to charge us to 'fix it' but they recommended a complete 'do-over' because most of the coding were outdated and piece-milled into each page.

II. October 2015 : we hired a freelancer.
a. He had nothing to show us until mid-December.
b. His focus was creating his idea of payment and member databases, which were never finished.
c. Once we said to stop creating those databases because we did not need them, he would do a screen share and show us what he was working on, which did not make sense.
c. There was nothing to show us except this time, my design was on the index page. 
d. We paid him as well, for nothing we can use.
e. Then he was in a horrible accident and his hand was fractured.
f. He used CI with MVC Frameworks and Bootstrap 3.x

III. end-December 2015 : we hired another freelancer.
a. She asked for the zip file of our entire project; in a call, she said it looked like she could finish it in a week or so?!
b She got the image back onto the index page, and said she did something to the htaccess document.
c. The index.php worked as before.
d. She was to review the site, and send us her comments of what she could and could not do and what else it would cost to finish. We waited 2 weeks for holidays to be over, then contacted and asked her for her review. She then said "Not for what you're looking for. You'd be better off searching for another developer."
e. We also paid her for basically nothing again.

Bottom line, we are seeking an honest person who will review our site to see if it worth salvaging? I am concerned that our files are in the hands of people we really do not know. We really need to be in verbal contact with someone, so we can get to know you and your work. 

Contact Info : 
On all day from a.m. to late p.m PST : Skype : EthanPaulsen from Kapa'a, Kauai, Hawaii
Best eMail : Rev Dr Cha

Mahalo for your time and for reading.
#2

Hi,

Sorry for your bad experiences, it should not be like this. Your site looks like it is in very early planning stage, alpha at best, stage 1, just getting going, nowhere near ready for prime time. In fact it looks like (and of course I have not seen the backend) a $20 template hosted and not yet filled in with content, ~2hours work at the most.

From what I understand of your requirements you are not actually asking for anything that complicated. In summary, you are offering an online (paid for) life coach experience. Members can log in, subscribe to emails, update or respond to journals. Coaches can read their subscribers journals and add updates in the private members area, or post articles for the public site.

It is an interesting idea and I was in discussion a few months ago with a business coach, who approached me for their personal website. I was interested in building a site for lots of coaches to offer online coaching services, and use the platform as their own business site, similar to your plan with five coaches. The plan fell on deaf ears unfortunately but I am still interested in the idea, although loathe to try it without access to lots of coaches.

My advice to you is to ideally find a developer that lives in your town, that you can visit and meet face to face. It is impossible to judge the progress of your backend as there is no access from the demo you linked to, however I am guessing that it is indeed in a terrible state and probably will not do what you were hoping it would do. Sorry.

The problem is that if someone has started out on the wrong foot, it can often be impossible to refactor the code into a workable solution, or at least more work that would be to do it right in the first place. Since multiple developers have looked, tried and failed, I am guessing that your code has either over-complicated the requirements or simply implemented it wrongly from the start.

Do you have a working version that we can at least log into to have a poke around. I am sure lots of people here would be willing to offer advice about it.

If you have and do not want to make it public, the pm me a link, username and password to any part you want me to take a look at and I will have a look for you.

Best wishes,

Paul.
#3

I agree with PaulD, find a developer close to your location and work closely with him/her.
#4

(This post was last modified: 01-07-2016, 06:38 PM by Liquid.)

(01-07-2016, 05:55 AM)PaulD Wrote: Hi,

Sorry for your bad experiences, it should not be like this. Your site looks like it is in very early planning stage, alpha at best, stage 1, just getting going, nowhere near ready for prime time. In fact it looks like (and of course I have not seen the backend) a $20 template hosted and not yet filled in with content, ~2hours work at the most.

From what I understand of your requirements you are not actually asking for anything that complicated. In summary, you are offering an online (paid for) life coach experience. Members can log in, subscribe to emails, update or respond to journals. Coaches can read their subscribers journals and add updates in the private members area, or post articles for the public site.

It is an interesting idea and I was in discussion a few months ago with a business coach, who approached me for their personal website. I was interested in building a site for lots of coaches to offer online coaching services, and use the platform as their own business site, similar to your plan with five coaches. The plan fell on deaf ears unfortunately but I am still interested in the idea, although loathe to try it without access to lots of coaches.

My advice to you is to ideally find a developer that lives in your town, that you can visit and meet face to face. It is impossible to judge the progress of your backend as there is no access from the demo you linked to, however I am guessing that it is indeed in a terrible state and probably will not do what you were hoping it would do. Sorry.

The problem is that if someone has started out on the wrong foot, it can often be impossible to refactor the code into a workable solution, or at least more work that would be to do it right in the first place. Since multiple developers have looked, tried and failed, I am guessing that your code has either over-complicated the requirements or simply implemented it wrongly from the start.

Do you have a working version that we can at least log into to have a poke around. I am sure lots of people here would be willing to offer advice about it.

If you have and do not want to make it public, the pm me a link, username and password to any part you want me to take a look at and I will have a look for you.

Best wishes,

Paul.

(01-07-2016, 06:41 AM)ivantcholakov Wrote: I agree with PaulD, find a developer close to your location and work closely with him/her.
Mahalo, PaulD & Ivantcholakov, for taking the time to reply to my post. And mahalo for the gentle words. We did, in fact, find someone who is local. She decided to 'not follow through' with her words.

Paul, you are spot on, and I did find someone who less than an hour or so, to determine 'nothing was developed by the previous developer' but only a mere shell of what it 'could be'. I actually had to edit the Memberships myself because of all the typos and my eMails not being read with such instructions. The correct Index images also were sent long ago, but not used.

Unfortunately, after money spent, our site is not only unusable but what you 'could' link to was 'all it is' currently. A different form of 'bad'. We will basically have to start over, which we finally had someone say... 'we must start over with the Journals', which are the most important feature of our membership site.

Again, mahalo for taking the time, guys. If something else goes wrong, I will return.

Happy New Year 2016
Kind regards,
Cha
#5

(This post was last modified: 02-03-2016, 02:28 PM by Liquid.)

Dear CI Admin, CI Staff and CI Developers,

It has been less than a month, and our site is at 99% completion as of today. I wanted to extend a deep, heartfelt mahalo nui loa to our new developer (keeping him to myself, sorreh) and the few others who contacted me via Skype, especially Robert, Frank, and Amjad. Unfortunately, we have definitely strayed away any developer from India. I know this is not fair, but our experience, English is important to know, and we have to understand your culture and your accent, which we struggled with significantly.

Our developer had our Journals up and running in 2 days; we actually could "use" our backend! The reason it has taken this long to go "live", it is because the past developers basically developed nothing. We had to start from scratch, AND we were able to design and create the 'exact' website we wanted from the very beginning! Because of our developer's ability to 'listen', he not only created our dreamsite but was able to make us understand what we could and could not do!

You have gained another huge fan to CI Development and everyone we speak to from this forum, we will refer our worldwide members here in finding an honest, hardworking developer! We are adding a link in our website eMporium to this forum, for ease of direct access to you.

Ci Admin, CI Staff and CI Developers, you are the best in the world! Mahalo for just being simply great and for reading!

Warm regards,
Rev Dr Cha
http://PlatZinum.com *offline*
#6

Thumbs up!
Codeigniter is simply one of the tools you need to learn to be a successful developer. Always add more tools to your coding arsenal!
#7

(02-03-2016, 02:19 PM)Liquid Wrote: Dear CI Admin, CI Staff and CI Developers,

It has been less than a month, and our site is at 99% completion as of today. . . . 

Dear Doctor Cha,

I had previously replied to your private message by admitting I was a hobbyist and not a professional developer, so I'm so happy to hear that your experience has turned out well. I'm glad that you've found an honest, authentic developer who can meet your needs and fulfill your goals. I hope your site is a great success, and I wish you the very best!
Hey, don't work without a PHP debugger. Several free IDEs have this features built in. Two are NetBeans and CodeLobster. Without a debugger, it's like you're driving with a blindfold on -- you are going to crash!
#8

Experienced developers who involved in the development of large-scale projects (like salesforce web services) can be found here.




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