Review Website/Business Start Up

leopardprint

Hi there, long time lurker of MSE. I have a business idea to set up a review website for a specific market, but I am pretty stuck on where to start. I am currently a housewife so have no income of my own, will I still be able to apply for a business loan or similar?

My business will be all web based, I will moderate any reviews left on the website. I plan on making an income by having other companies advertise on the site.

I will be working from home so my initially outgoings will be relatively small. Obviously the website will be the most important factor for my business. I have already purchased the domain name, but I need someone to create a website. I know there are websites such as peopleperhour and elance...does anyone have any experience using these or any alternatives?

Sorry for the long and rambling post, I would greatly appreciate any hints and tips anyone has!

InsertWittyName

I use peopleperhour as a freelancer and find it great - I've always had great feedback from clients too.

I've also used elance in the past and I prefer peopleperhour to be honest.

I don't build websites but do something similar.

It costs nothing to post a job up and you don't have to accept any of the bids you receive - it's worthwhile posting even if all it gives you is some idea of the cost.

If you do post the job up, please put as much detail about your requirements into the description as you can, it means that people can provide an accurate bid

Good luck!

leopardprint

That is really helpful, thanks. I will post a job up with as much detail as I can to get a relatively accurate quote, for my business plan if nothing else!

Thank you

paddyrg

Beware - custom development is always a big deal, a really big deal. What seems simple based on your understandings/beliefs of how it 'should' work, and what's 'obvious' needs to be spelled out in full. If you've never managed an IT project before, I strongly suggest getting someone to work with you on it as a project manager. Every button, every action, every colour, shape, etc needs to be specified.

Think how fiddly building a house is - you wouldn't do it alone, you bring an architect and maybe they will even bring more people depending on complexity! And full custom development, even offshored, will likely be in the 5-figures ballpark by the time you've got it delivered, debugged, hosted, tested, secure(!), and ready for action. Yes, really! And cutting corners on testing, integration, ergonomics etc WILL show.

As a starting point, to reduce the grief to you, can you go now and find 3 sites which do almost what you want to do? There is rarely any need to fully develop from scratch for the web these days, there are a lot of frameworks (wordpress, joomla, drupal, django, etc) which can accelerate what you want to do - especially if you can adapt your idea by 5% to fit into a framework as opposed to adapt the framework. For instance a cocktails website might actually be able to take almost all the functionality from a cookery/recipe website.

Find the websites that do *almost* what you want to do. If nothing else, they will help you tighten up your ideas. Then look and see if they're running on a platform like drupal - if they are, you're in luck, tweak the idea a little and you might just save £10k or so!

I did this stuff as a consultant for one of the BIG software companies plus various web startups from the end of the 90's - things are massively easier for you now than back then, take advantage of that ;-)

leopardprint

That is incredibly helpful, paddyrg! There is an American website that's incredibly similar to the one I want to set up...I'm so glad I found it as it is quite daunting just thinking about how I would communicate what I wanted.

How would I go about finding out if they are running on a platform?

paddyrg

leopardprint wrote: »

How would I go about finding out if they are running on a platform?

A bit of snooping from someone technical might give it away! Feel free to pm and I'll have a look tomorrow sometime, and in the meantime see if you can find any others that are pretty close... If you can find one there may well be others

Edit-you may be anxious about giving anything away like if you send the similar site that I might race into the same sector. Totally understandable, and so no worries if you take me up on the offer or not. I'm not in their sector any more, totally easy either way

leopardprint

I will have a browse and see if I can find any other similar sites and will give you a PM. Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.

paddyrg

Great, just on my phone now, will do some digging tomorrow from a real machine. Any other sites or similar things you see also feel free to pm, I'll get onto it tomorrow I can't guarantee a definitive answer of course, but hopefully we can work out a starting trajectory for you

CKhalvashi

I'm thinking for reasonable flexibility, that Moonfruit may be a good idea (some of our artists use it).

Take a look, as you may be able to do it yourself.

CK

Percy1983

It does make me think you could potentially do this yourself, from what I know you want it sounds like wordpress could do it, there is some learning to do but nothing too bad

paddyrg

I read your PM :-)

Good and bad news! Yes, it's a platform, no it isn't an open, free one. In fact it has been developed since 2000, starting as a different sector tool, then they added more things, bells and whistles, and ended up with a custom platform that underpins 100+ sites. They've done a good job, and sold to venture capital company.

So - options from here -
* work out which bits of this site you like most, and find a new way to emulate them
* approach the company to license their platform (not gonna be cheap and will require infrastructure)
* approach the company about expanding the tool into the UK where you'll provide the local administration and promotion, they provide the technology.

The third of these is far from a dead cert, and the risk is they'll decide to do just that but without you. But it is by far the cheapest option and if you can show local expertise you'll be the easiest option. You would need to get a legally tight agreement.

The first is going to cost money, but perhaps you can find other sites that do something similar and we can hopefully have a look under their covers. Which bits of that functionality are core, essential from day 1, and which can be added once/if you're making money?

In terms of a platform to implement it through, I'd suggest Drupal may be the best candidate - much more flexible/powerful than wordpress but is still a case of configuring up a bunch of modules as opposed to starting from the ground up like that site you sent did.