I just launched a new completely rebuilt website.
For some time I’ve envisioned a site I could use to manage my
entire art inventory. It had been getting
more and more complicated to track paintings out at galleries and shows. It had been almost impossible for collectors
to find paintings of the appropriate size on my website. It had been impossible to post multiple
images of paintings (with and without frames).
My site just wasn’t scaling.
I imagined an “amazon-like” website with clickable filters
to find paintings by size, subject, media, cost and/or location.
If figured that I have lots of experience given my high-tech
background, and that I l could leverage this brave new outsourced world to find
someone to efficiently (and economically) build me a new site. In high-tech I’ve developed huge projects
using teams from different countries.
How hard could it be to build a new website? Trick is – I don’t have the same kind of
budget in my art business that I’ve had in the past with venture capital backed
startups.
Knowing how important it is to carefully document what one wants
to build if you’re working with people who are far away and for whom English is
a second language, I carefully specified what I wanted. Then I put the project out to bid on
www.odesk.com, an outsourcing website that lets employers find contractors from
around the world.
I had bids come in from literally everywhere – India, China,
Africa, Russia. At least 20 people
replied to my post within 24 hours. Wow
I thought. This might really work.
I interviewed and picked someone from St. Petersburg to do
the site. He got the new site half way
built, but when I paid him for 50% of the work he apparently decided to cut and
run. He left the site in an unusable
state, and I had to throw out all that work and start over.
On my second try, I again put it out to bid and got someone
from Romania to build the site. He
really did a great job, but when he was 80% done he too cut and run. Said he had an emergency come up, and he
stopped replying to emails. At least he
left me with some working code, and I was smarter this time and had insisted up
front that I’d only pay once it was done.
For the third phase I decided to work on it myself. This is a big complicated site with lots of
backend code do this the advanced filtering that I wanted. I have a software background (somewhat dated
at this point), but I’m happy to say that I was able to get in there and fix
the worst of the problems. Good news is
that I proved to myself that I could figure it out and support the site. Bad news – it was going to talk way too much of
my time to get it launched.
Forth phase – back out to bid. This time I figured I had a very specific
list tasks I needed done, and this might be better suited for an odesk
contractor. I found someone in India who
seemed to have a strong background, but once he started I realized that much of
what I was doing was out of his league.
He fixed a few things, but there was still more to do.
So this last weekend I just buckled down to see if I could
get this done myself. Two very long days
later, and I have the site launched.
That was a painful birth four months in the making. It was much harder than I had imagined when I
started, but I’m really thankful that I’m there now. Let’s just hope it doesn’t blow up this week J
You can find the new site at: www.timonsloane.com
Check it out, and drop me a note if you find any problems or
if you have some feedback.
