Need help with new website

[jerrymarketing]

Hi everyone,

I need help with regards on how best to go about creating a website that can help relieve some of the manual work I'm doing with my business.

Bit of background information, my business revolves around matching tuition assignments between students and tutor. Here's how the business works and briefly what we need in the new website.

1) Student request a home tutor from us via an online form, the submitted online form is distributed among our coordinators for moderation before posting them online in the available assignments page.

2) Once the tutor request has been approved by our coordinators; it will be posted to the available assignment page. Tutors who match the subject, level and area of the assignment will receive an email notification inviting them to apply for the assignment.

3) Once the tutor request goes live, tutors can apply for the assignment in their login area and also indicated their preferred rate and timings.

4) Tutors can create an account with us. They will be able to create a profile with their photos, educational background and experience etc on the page. Most information on the profile page is viewable to the public except for the contact info.

5) The coordinators will be able to see the full profile of the tutors who applied for the assignment and decide who to hire. Tutors that are not selected will automatically receive a notification email. It would be great if the website can send the confirmation email to the selected tutor as well.

An example of my competitors’ site would be www[dot]temasektutors[dot]com and startutor[dot]sg

Would wordpress with customization be able to do the above?

Any recommendation on how to go about creating my website will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[SteveGerencser]

You need a real programmer to build you solution, wordpress, or any other off the shelf open source thing won't do it. Or, you will spend more money making it do it than just having something made for you that does exactly what you want. http://damncoders.com/

[jerrymarketing]

Hi,

Thanks for getting back.

I'm certainly looking to hire someone to do it for me. My concern for starting from scratch is certainly security venerability.

Any thing i should look out for when hiring someone to do it for me?

[Tubby]

Look for a 'mostly' unbiassed reccomendation.

This could seem to be biased and spammy - or merely promo for a fellow long term forum member.

AN ENDORSEMENT
I was writing a pointless and irrelevant post at the WebProWorld forum when I noticed that my 'In-Box' was empty. I instinctively located one of my web pages and submitted a message to myself. . . It never arrived.
I quickly ended my post with a quick note; Something like "Gotta go My email software has gone "PHUTT".

My natural solution to this problem was to send myself another message. Check the email . . I did this about thirty times. On the thirty first time Outlook express indicated that an email was arriving . . It was from William Cross. The message basically said "DO YOU NEED SOME HELP?

Staying in true form that befitted my character I immediately grabbed hold of my copy of 'The idiots guide to PANIC!!' stood up from my desk and spent three minutes running in circle around my office hitting myself over the head with book shouting " DO I NEED HELP? DO I NEED HELP? DO I NEED HELP?"

I found the 'damn Coders' on my facebook page this morning . My immediate reaction was to copy and print the logo and I carefully glued the image onto the fist page of my "Idiots guide to PANICK!!".

** I liked the 'Damn coders' logo. It has humour. The world we live in was created 10% funny and any person or organization that does not understand , recognize or acknowledge this is clearly out of touch with reality.
** I like the text that simply acknowledges our never ending need for the cursed individuals who can accomplish tasks that we ourselves find impossible.
** I like that the Logo 'works' - It always amuses me to find a programmer that can create anything that works.

William solve my problem . (Obviously) Otherwise this endorsement would not have been written.
Thanks William.


NOTE
Yes. I owe William the odd favour. No honest recommendation is delivered to an unknown quantity.. (But the recomendation stands)

[Tubby]

P.S. to the moderators ... Am I in trouble now?

[DaveSawers]

I too would recommend a bespoke solution as the only practical route.

It need not be too complex, but does need to be implemented with security in mind. If I were doing it I would use PHP as the programming language and MySQL as the database.

Presumably, you'll also need a payment gateway in order to charge your students. If you make them pay something up front, your moderation duties should be fairly small. You could also use the database to monitor your tutors earnings and pay them, collect and display student feedback and a host of other things.

So I would recommend spending a little bit of money up front to get a design done that incorporates all your required features and is detailed enough to put out for tender.

[StanDaMan]

I would think it would be cheaper to hire a professional than to do it yourself (at least that's my experience). But if you're looking to save money, since you appear to work with students and colleges, maybe you can find a student programmer to do it as a school project (and for a nominal fee)? What's your budget?

[morestar]

I would think it would be cheaper to hire a professional than to do it yourself (at least that's my experience). But if you're looking to save money, since you appear to work with students and colleges, maybe you can find a student programmer to do it as a school project (and for a nominal fee)? What's your budget?

I agree and I also believe Wordpress could be a viable solution to your project, especially if you're into saving money developing the site. From my look at your requirements, there would be some custom programming that would have to be done but in the end you'll save a lot of time too cause most of your requirements come built in to Wordpress.

1) Student request a home tutor from us via an online form, the submitted online form is distributed among our coordinators for moderation before posting them online in the available assignments page.

The online form is easy to develop and you could even use a reliable free plugin. The form can be easily distributed to your coordinators for moderation.

2) Once the tutor request has been approved by our coordinators; it will be posted to the available assignment page. Tutors who match the subject, level and area of the assignment will receive an email notification inviting them to apply for the assignment.

This would be manually done by the approving coordinator or you can have this requirement custom built to be automatic.

3) Once the tutor request goes live, tutors can apply for the assignment in their login area and also indicated their preferred rate and timings.

This is where Wordpress plugins most likely won't do the trick and custom coding would have to be done but I'm not yet 100% sure about that yet. Your programmer should look into this.

4) Tutors can create an account with us. They will be able to create a profile with their photos, educational background and experience etc on the page. Most information on the profile page is viewable to the public except for the contact info.

This is something that Wordpress comes packed with. There would be some setting customization needed but not much.

5) The coordinators will be able to see the full profile of the tutors who applied for the assignment and decide who to hire. Tutors that are not selected will automatically receive a notification email. It would be great if the website can send the confirmation email to the selected tutor as well.

Depending on your needs, this also would probably need some custom coding for it to be as tip-top as you'd prefer it to be.

Also when it comes to security, Wordpress is pretty good too. There are a few areas during setup that you'd want to take care of from a security standpoint but from thereafter all you'd need to do is make sure you Wordpress install is updated every time they release a new version - this and the initial setup security is all you'll need to keep your security in check.

[jerrymarketing]

I'm actually leaning more to a PHP/mySQL solution as i figured wordpress will not be able to do what I wanted.

What do you guys reckon is the best framework or CMS for my requirements?

Thanks for the input thus far! Very insightful!

[mwbyrd]

I'm actually leaning more to a PHP/mySQL solution as i figured wordpress will not be able to do what I wanted.

What do you guys reckon is the best framework or CMS for my requirements?

Thanks for the input thus far! Very insightful!

Probably Drupal or Joomla.