We tried to do something along these lines in Melbourne, Australia. It was called Dragonfly. A few points:<p>- We emailed people to update their availability. If they were available this week, we'd email. Otherwise they could set their busyness to between 1 week and 3 months.<p>- We tracked where people were working and used that to bill the companies that hired them. First we charged a flat subscription rate of $3600 per year but people didn't want to pay that. We then charged $100 per week per freelancer. They wanted to go back to paying the subscription again. Then we went broke.<p>- People won't keep their availabilities up to date. They won't like you asking them to keep their availabilities up to date either. They really won't like you asking them where they're working this week.<p>- People will ask you how you're curating the list. If you're not curating it, theirs no point in using it as I can get list of people to hire anywhere. I want a list of people that are good at what they do.<p>- Recruiters function because they hide the cost of hiring freelancers. You're a design agency, your charge out rate is $250/h. Hiring this gun front end developer through a recruiter costs me $100/h. I make $150/h, simple math.<p>The most important things to solve from POV is how you're going to curate the list and keep the bad coders off it. You want to start with A's and only have A's. As soon as B's creep onto the list then your reputation goes down. Also, because you want to keep showing growth, C's and D's begin to creep onto it. Also, your friend who you like but sucks at JavaScript will ring you up and ask to be placed on it.<p>Good luck.
QA:<p>- The settings link is a 404 if you haven't completed your profile yet.<p>- There isn't a link to complete the registration flow from the rest of the app. If you click Settings prematurely and get that 404, your profile is hosed unless you know to find <a href="http://availability.is/users/calendars" rel="nofollow">http://availability.is/users/calendars</a> in your history.<p>- There's no obvious way to choose a profile photo.<p>- The calendar listing doesn't auto-update. I just went and made a calendar (thinking it was required) in GC, but I can't link it to your site.<p>- It isn't made clear during registration that the availability calendar is a feature, not a requirement.
Most customers don't look just for available candidates but for ones that also match the required skill set. Just looking for some available "backend developer" wont work.
Guessing it's built in Lithium (<a href="http://lithify.me/docs/manual" rel="nofollow">http://lithify.me/docs/manual</a>). The favicon is the default one from the sample application (<a href="https://github.com/UnionOfRAD/framework/blob/master/app/webroot/favicon.ico" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/UnionOfRAD/framework/blob/master/app/webr...</a>)
Just a minor thing: You could replace the "tick" icon with Font Awesome [1] icons so they wouldn't look pixelated on retina displays.<p>[1] <a href="http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/" rel="nofollow">http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/</a>
The registration form is terrible: each time it doesn't like some input all the fields are reset and you have to start from scratch.
Then the website URL validation is broken: for instance, I can't use a domain with a hyphen for it, but I can in the e-mail field.
Also, the twitter field could be optional, and in any case tolerate getting the handle with the @ symbol prefixed.
Anyway, the really bad part is the first point because it promotes the others from annoyances into pain.<p>The site looks good, though. It might end up working very well with some refinements as others noted.
Neat idea. I would expect there to be a link to each freelancer's portfolio/personal website before ever considering clicking on "Hire Me".
Maybe a signup via email as an alternative to those of us that don't like to use our various google, twitter, facebook, github accounts for signing up?
1. Oh that looks totally cool!<p>2. Sign up...<p>3. As a freelancer...<p>4. Google account?!<p>5. Go back. Is there no other option?<p>6. Seems not. Fuck you. I'd much rather create an account than give you my gmail address, have you use my fake name that I set on my google account, and have a single point of failure for authentication availability and security. That is assuming you only request read access.
Any good freelancer/contractor knows your availability is largely unimportant to the success of your own business. In other words, you don't normally lose money because you're unavailable, you lose it because you don't have work lined up.
As someone who hires developers, it would be great to see a link to a resume. It often takes a lot of digging to find out what kind of experience a developer has from their website.
I see that "UX" is not an option.<p>User Experience is a skillset that many clients need, and that many also mistake for visual design or front-end coding. They're very different things.