Is the the downward spiral after the peak? - part 2

oh oh i will do the HL fav thingy.

HERE COMES THE AUTOPILOT :p

 Scriptlance is full of them. I used to pay $40 for each 5 page site. There are people there that will complete a project for free just to receive a good feedback.

 OMG thats really amazing :O

Yeah and if it's true, I'm done with Dolphin! LOL>

WOW!

Thanks for the heads up on freelancer....! I got this database driven site I've been trying to complete for some time now. This might be the ticket!

(I posted jobs here and only one person responded.)

 No problem, glad it helped.. Here's what I learned from my all my projects:

Elance - freelancers are more professional and a more user friendly site.. but also people who want more money for their work.

Freelancer - middle of the road on price/bids but it has that nice certification system where you can see all the tests the programmer passed.

Scriptlance - not a very professional site and somewhat shady business practices but the cheapest source for programmers maybe in the world. There is a bit of a language barrier so sometimes it does get a little frustrating. Always look at their feedback and samples.

I would never do a project where I paid up front. These sites all have escrow systems so you're not going to get shafted. Also if you're ever bored it's fun to read the projects.. it never fails at least once a day you can find something like "I would like a site that makes $200 a day. Payment will be made after the site has made the first $1000". Then you look at the project budget and it's $50. Why would someone who can magically create a site that makes $200 a day do it for you for $50? Also the projects like "I need someone to write a script to bypass the Facebook captcha". But apparently these guys CAN get you 10,000 "fans" on facebook in a matter of hours.. and cheap too, lol. 

We actually spent a great deal of time looking into getting it all custom made in India..... There were too many problems. Yes, we could have hired a team, but we knew very little about the team or their skills or whether we were going to get ripped off. We even had some skype interviews with candidates, all of which really didnt have a clue or know how to understand a concept.

We also looked at having it done in the UK, and again had inerviews with people alleging to be geniuses that wantes £80ph to work.

At the end of the day, a reliable CMS is a realistic option if it is supported. Whatever your dolphin site is about, it will grow and it will consume more money than you planned.

I only use two dolphin coders now, and I do feel that I get value for money for their work (they are not of the knowledge is power variety).  But the real problems with dolphin are core problems, stabillity, reliabillity, security etc.

I too am now looking into WP as an alternative.

- Getting a site done "from scratch" and more so, being able to reuse the platform for another site is not going to cost anywhere close to 10,000 or even 100,000$/eu/etc, if you're looking for something comparable to what Dolphin does. Very roughly, you'd be looking for about two years and about a 1m$ in time and cost. Ongoing costs would be still far larger than using Dolphin, even if you have to pay for extensions upgrades.

- Dolphin is not in any way worse than WP in terms of stability, security and extensions updates, especially if you factor in capabilities out of the box.

- In our latest updates - 7.1 and 7.1.1 we've specifically been focusing on maintaining compatibility of extensions, ease of their upgrade and incentives in Market to do so.

- Getting a freelancer and doing a "custom" job for Dolphin or any software for that matter is NOT going to be cheaper. You may choose to go this way due to different reasons, but price must not be the one. Custom = expensive. 

- Choose vendors and products wisely, look at version updates history, ask questions, go for modules that don't change core files, don't buy things you don't need, keep it lean.

- And finally, as we speak, we are working on solutions to the extensions updates, version updates and vendors "motivation" issues. They're coming. Stay tuned!

Exactly Andrew.

I have to agree with all that you have said. I am aware that my site does things that I never thought possibe. Ok, so it has cost a lot to achieve this and still has  a way to go as far as expenditure goes, but to have it coded from scratch here in the uk I would have had to spend several times what I have spent.

Its just a shame that as investors (working on the best platform we can afford) have to put up with some pretty basic core problems. The market (which boonex would rappidly die without) has become a bit of a joke and needs to be stabalised. Moreover, developers and even some of the (alledgedly intelligent) coders that do help on here need to realise that investors use dolphin mainly because they do not have the knowledge required (and that this is not an excuse to adopt a knowledge is power attitude).

People need to work together - Investors (site owners) + boonex (witht he correct attitude) + developers (of the honest variety) = Success.... Its not rocket science people!

Andrew - any thoughts on a responsive layout theme for Dolphin?

Daiho: reported your post by error :-) sorry

I would also ask aboiut responsive template - in fact I would thosedays dont buy or uise any otgher template than responsive as too many people browsing from their  mobile devices so proper display is a must there..

http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/Question-to-ALL-developers-.2.htm#202076

Don't ask why i tried to do it. I always start with looking into it and end up doing it lol

great Prashank - hope somebody or you more develop it and release :-)

 I am yet to see a solution that's not confusing and that can be implemented along with Page Builders. So far I see more promise in universal rather than responsive. 

Please explain what you mean by universal instead of responsive?

The templates that AndrewP and PRashank put here seem to be pretty straight forward and do the job. 

Andrew.. I also dont understand what u exactly mean ? I agree with daihlo that now when AndrewP and Prashank acually done that and done that very quickly so resonsive template is possible and actually it really works I think thats the right way for rest of template developers...

 Andrew, if you are meaning universal as in mobile pages, then they are also on there way to becoming  obsolete, why would anyone waste their time & money on building limited mobile pages when they can have a responsive template that allows full unrestricted use of the site.

 Which guys for 10,000 likes?

dont get drawn into this. Fake site activity always backfires...

Facebook recently made a statement that they now focus MORE on their mobile platform than they do on their desktop one as this is now where the majority of their user interaction is and rapidly shifting towards more.

The Boonex mobile app/license really isn't very good. Not only does it not offer the same facilities as desktop Dolphin, it doesn't look or perform the same.

The thing with Dolphin, is it's a site 'builder' so each user will have (or could have) a very different social network to another. Not only different modules, but different layouts, different ways to interact, different focuses etc... I've built Dolphin sites that have been completely different to each other. 

Try this on the mobile app and that goes out the window.

There have been other attempts to close this gap, WAP module being one of them. Was good, and many think a step forward from the mobile app. 

The new responsive layout that AndrewP has released is looking to be 10 times better again though, have been testing the demo link and it works very well. 

Andrew  just messaged me to say that the photos are now also responsive. The whole thing will now display and allow all the functions you put together on your Dolphin site.

Responsive for me is very much the way forwards just as mobile sites are the way forwards...

As we see responsive version in not that complicated for dolphin as it looked before I would suggest that responsive default d7 template can be added to 7.1.2 - I think if default theme will be responsive woukld be great addon and as we see not that hard to actually do that.

I would like to also know what people make yoiu 10.000 likes and how much was cost ?

 I was kind-of wondering about this too...

The first sentence by it self though made me think- "NO KIDDING!"....But, I was thinking of my PAGEs Module option and its page builder- WooHoo FUN! But I'm pretty sure that's not what he's talking about....

Perhaps it relates to how blocks are aligned when they get "Squeezed" over into a single column? Typically, we spend time designing pages for multiple columns arranging things to look good and flow a certain way to make better sense (for lack of a better way to explain it) and when things are all pushed into a single column, in ways it defeats our initial design plans? So calls for some sort of universal pattern of how blocks should be sorted when if/when arranged from multi-column to single???

IDK- Just a guess I guess :)

I will add- I'm loving AndrewP's awesome ZZZ Responsive Design on my site!

Is Andrew allowing 'normal' people to test the responsive design?  Is this going to replace my current theme and colors?

 you can test it as he puts a demo link on the module in market.

http://miramis.ru/v6/index.php?skin=neo

http://www.demozzz.ru/d71/index.php?skin=zzz

 X~) I don't about "normal"- but he let this crazy SOB (me)- purchase it LOL ...

I'm feeling I put it trough quite a bit of scrutiny with all the mods, designs, and customizations I have and do on my site.

Of  course- you'll need to ask him if about the second question???

 Well yes. It's a template. And like any other template it has it's own theme and colors.

Thanks guys.  I sent him an e-mail.  I like the responsive style but I need to keep my current colors etc.