WordPress always amazes me, each day with the countless abilities that allows anyone to transform it into any niche site. You can use WordPress as a CMS for just any niche out there, and the most interesting part is that you think it, and there’s a theme already available for that.
Earlier, I showed you how to create a Fiverr like site using WordPress, which is praised by many, and today I am going to show you how to create a Freelancer like a site using WordPress.
Since, quite a few times, I’ve been using Freelance services, on various sites like Freelancer.com, Odesk.com, ELance.com, Guru.com and many more to hire freelancers for small works such, plugin development, writing any custom script, app development, logo designing, etc.
Most of the time, I end up with hiring an affordable expert, who does what he promises and that too, within a pre-defined deadline. Bingo! that’s easy, hassle-free, and most likely would cost you far lesser than hiring any full-fledged dedicated firm, and top of all delivers nearly the same or even higher quality of final work.
Overall we can say, “Freelance sites are the proven ways to find the best and one of the most affordable methods to outsource our any work, on the internet.”
The Freelance marketplace concept
In simple terms, these are the sites that allow freelancer or sellers to register their profiles, a description of their services creates a portfolio of their work, and also mentions information about their charges. On, the other hand buyers or the one who wants to hire a skilled freelancer creates a profile, posts his job, or the work he wants to get done, along with their requirements, deadline, and budget.
Buyers or freelancers will bid for these jobs, either one time fixed price job or on the hour basis. Sellers often select the freelancers on the basis of their ratings, lower price, lesser time, and their previous work histories, etc.
Once, the seller awards his job, to a chosen freelancer, he can track the work status, can contact him via messages, and upon the completion of the job, the seller grants a payment using online payment systems like PayPal, Moneybookers, etc.
Why create yet another project bidding site, when there are already many?
That’s definitely the first question, which strikes your mind, before creating such a Freelancer website but, what I believe is that there’s always a scope for something better in every aspect of life. The same fact applies to these freelancer sites here.
Though there are already many, with some unique features you can make your freelancer site, stand out from the crowd.
Now, the question is how?
Well, there are endless possibilities to create something with a difference! for instance:
- You can create a niche only project bidding site like it’s only related to website projects, website transfer, website optimization for speed, enhancing website security, adding a CDN to any website, upgrading to any hosting plan, tuning the server and so on.
- You can raise a WordPress only project bidding website, where users will post their projects related to WordPress, and the interested WordPress professionals could bid on the projects.
- You can create a city-specific project bidding site, where the local people post their projects related to everyday stuff and the interested person will bid for that particular project. It could be an instant hit if advertised and managed smartly!
- You can create a freelancer site as an article writing service, where bloggers can hire writers to write their articles and the interested writers could easily bid on any writing project, they are interested to write.
- You can even create a dedicated animation/3D modeling freelance site, where anyone can post a project for their specific needs where, skilled professionals, newbie artists with fresh ideas can bid on the desired projects.
- And so on…
WordPress Project bidding theme
The Project theme is surprisingly the only WordPress theme in the World, that holds the ability to transform any WordPress installation into a modern yet robust, project bidding system and enables you to raise up your own Freelance website, within few clicks.
It comes integrated with a dedicated user dashboard, a private communication system, a virtual credit system to deposit cast into account, and bundles a host of monetization tools to make more money out of your freelancer website.
What are the requirements to get started?
1. A domain name – As usual, a domain name is a very first step to get a space reserve on the internet, or in case if you want to start freelance service on your existing site, then just skip this step.
2. A hosting plan – You need a reliable hosting plan to host your freelance website. For starters, you can go for a SiteGround GrowBig plan, which is affordable, yet scales well for the starting traffic. Or if you already own any other hosting plan, then again, you need to skip to the next step.
Find appropriate hosting for WordPress, in this guide.
3. Buy Project Bidding theme for WordPress – The theme costs, you roughly $99, for a one-time fee, which I think is a perfect license type for the beginners. However, if you want access to all the extensions then you should opt for the Pro version that starts at $279
Use Coupon code PROMO20 and avail flat 20% discount on any theme.
How to setup WordPress Project Bidding theme?
Now that you’ve got a domain name, hosting account, WordPress Project theme, all you need to do is first propagate your domain name with your hosting provider. Once your domain name is propagated, you now need to install WordPress on your domain, if you need any help, just use this step-by-step guide.
Alright, everything looks good here, since you’re WordPress is installed, it’s time to install the theme:
There are two ways two install a WordPress theme: use the WordPress, dashboard>Appearance>Themes>Install themes and select upload, locate & install the theme zip package, and once the theme is installed then just push the activate button.
You can also use the good old FTP method to install the theme but, I would recommend the earlier.
Configuring Project Theme for WordPress
Once, you had installed the theme, a custom menu will appear within the WordPress dashboard, it has got a pretty long list of features. The very first window will display a quick summary of your project site, that displays a total number of projects posted, no of open projects, no of closed and finished projects along with details about total no of users including administrators, subscribers, service providers, and business owners.
General options
The default setting area, where you’re going to set up the minute but very crucial features of your Project bidding site, such as logo, user types, project files, visibility of the projects under the categories, and location pages. If you want to enable “feature,” projects to be displayed on the front page of your site, just checked the “Enabled feature option.”
If you don’t want search engines to crawl on your site ( absolutely not recommended and I had no idea why would you want to?) then you can switch the option to “Yes.” This setting page has got 20 something options to configure, which is super simple with mostly, “Yes” or “No.”
While, those Facebook and Twitter, tabs are meant to enable social login to your site using WordPress Social login plugin and the last tab, allow you to filter emails, and URLs under the private messaging feature of your site.
If you are confused about any option, or it’s functionality, just hover over to the “?” icon and it’ll display brief information about that individual feature.
Email settings
This email setting interface is a one-stop area to configure the entire email setting for your project site. On the default tab you can define the email name, primary email address of your project bidding site, and if you’re sending HTML emails then just select it to “Yes.”
The theme allows you to set up email configuration to just everything, be it new user registration, project approval, project delivered, private message, payment on the completed project, and more. There’s nothing much to configure, as all the default settings, and email templates are good to go, but still, if you want to modify something, go ahead!
Pricing settings
Under the pricing settings, you can set the default currency which you’re going to accept on your project bidding site. The theme supports 25+ currency including Euros, USD, British Pound, Brazilian Real, Russian Ruble, Danish Kroner, Indian Rupee, and many more so I guess there would be no problem at all in accepting the payments from any part of the World.
Furthermore, you can set the currency symbol, and its position, etc.
The next tab, allows you to set the fee for listing any project or you can make it free, featured project listing fee, sealed project listing fee, hide the project from a search engine, minimum withdraw an amount. The third tab has predefined project budgets i.e. small, medium, big, and huge.
If you want your custom project budget package, then it can be easily created within this tab.
Custom Pricing
If you want to enable custom posting and bidding fees for each of the categories on your project bidding site, then just set the option to “Yes,” and set the fee value.
Custom Fields
In case if you want any extra custom field to be available for your project site, then use this area to create, as much as you want. The field type could be text, radio select, check-box, HTML box, and can be marked as mandatory or not. Additionally, if you want a custom field to be displayed only on a specific category, then it can be easily configured using this panel.
The next tab, you could see in this panel displays, a total no of current custom field that you’ve created.
User Fields
Alike of custom fields, you can also create user fields, but these will appear only on user types, be it “service buyers” or “providers.”
Image Options
This setting zone controls all of the image settings for your site, the first option lets you enable or disable max no of images, and you can define the value for the maximum no of images allowed to be uploaded on the projects. If you don’t want the users to upload any images on the projects, you can turn it off, from the third option.
Additionally, if you want to charge a fee for uploading images, then go ahead, set the number of free images allowed to be uploaded, and set the extra charge value per image. In the second tab, you can set the image resizing setting for your site.
Advertising Settings
If you’re using advertising as an extra method of monetization, these settings make your work easier by allowing you to put ad-code snippets, on the homepage, project single page, category page, single blog, or a normal page of your site.
Layout Settings
The theme comes with five pre-defined layout settings, which are quite helpful to make desire changes on the front-end of your site. Just select the preferred layout, and push the save button, and you’re done. The next header tab, allows you to set the logo.
The footer of the theme is divided into two parts, the left, and right, and you can individually put any content within each area of the footer. The last tab is to change the colors, for background, footer, and top links.
Now comes the important aspect of your freelancer site, these payment gateway settings allows you to accept payments for projects on your site from four different methods, PayPal, Payza/AlertPay, Moneybookers/Skrill, Bank Payment (offline payment option.)
All you need to do is put in your registered e-mail address from the given services, and you’re done! Start accepting payments on your site.
Withdrawals
This section handles all the requests for Withdraws, the tabbed panel contains, unresolved, resolved, and rejected requests. Also if you want to search the withdrawal requests by users then you may use the search boxes.
Escrow
Escrow is a feature that allows the project owner to deposit money into the escrow for the bid winner, until the bidder finishes the project. As soon as the bidder completes the project, the escrow is released and the bidder will receive funds in his account, which can be requested for withdrawal from the site owner.
User Balances
It shows, the existing balance of any site user, there’s nothing much to do, except if you want to increase credit or decrease the credit of any user, just use this panel. You can search the balance of any user, by switching the next tab, and then just type the username and hit enter.
User Reviews
This panel shows a list of user-submitted reviews if any. While the next allows you to search for reviews by submitting “usernames.”
User Types
This panel lists the entire user base of your site if any user demands then you can also switch his user type, as a provider or contractor. This feature will come handy to manage user base, once you’ve 100+ registered users on your site.
Private Messages
If you want to monitor private messaging on your site, then this panel comes easy and displays the entire private messages submitted on your site. The second tab, allows you to search private messages by username.
Orders
Well! orders are just projects, and this panel shows you all the open, delivered, completed, or paid orders from your site.
InSite Transactions
The transaction history, displays each and every transaction occurred on your site, and by using the second tab, you can also search transaction history by any user.
Tracking tools
Every site needs a tracking system to track the number of visitors you’re receiving on your website, to know the accurate number of page views, bounce rate, etc. This panel is useful if you want to use Google Analytics as a primary method of the tracking system on your site.
In case, if you want to use some other tracking system just switch to the second tab, and put your other tracking code. Alright, so that’s the last from project theme settings panel, and I had previewed each and every functionality about the theme.
Let’s take a quick overview of the admin view of the “projects,” custom post type, and a sample admin view of a project.
Project theme “Project,” types
This theme comes with separate custom post type, titled as “Projects,” the quick view panel generated a list of all the projects posted on your site and shows a lot of information right on the page, including, title, posted date and time, price, the expiry time, featured, approval status of each and every project.
It comes handy while managing projects and taking a quick glance at any project, without getting inside the single post area of any project. The custom post type, has two custom taxonomies, Project category, and location.
The project category is useful while, the classification of your projects, while the location is to classify the project by the area, such as California, Nevada, Florida, New York City, etc.
Single Project admin view
The single admin view of a project comes with a whole lot of features, a side project details widget shows everything about a project including price category package, featured status, project visibility status to search engines, closed status, address.
The single project view also comes with 4 custom meta boxes, that include Project custom fields, project images, project files, and project bids.
Posting a new Project on Project theme from the front-end
This is a front-end view of posting a sample project on the project bidding site, what appeals to me is a professional layout and a three-step posting process. Any visitor on your site can fill the required details, select the given features, and within a few seconds he/she can see his project live on the site.
User Dashboard
As you can see, my account area of a user on your site is quite detailed and shows all his activities on a single panel. The user dashboard is universal for both project posters and bidder. It gives you access to all the site features, for eg. Finances, private messages, personal info, reviews, and more.
Sample Project posted on Freelancer site
Finally, you can see a sample project posted on a site, where a user wants to fix his yard’s fence, the project area is located in Long Island, New York and the time left to bid on the project is 27 days something. The project is classified as a big project, and the average bid posted for the project is $122.
Final thoughts
Just take my word, this is the best and the only theme if you want to create a Freelancer like a website using WordPress and bundles with a vast set of features to run a project bidding site effortlessly plus it scales excellently with a large user base.
Furthermore, the most important thing I want to say about this theme, is that it doesn’t require any extraordinary skills to run or manage a project bidding site and even a fairly average WordPress user can raise & run his own Freelancer like site without any hassles.
A custom freelancer like WordPress theme would cost you a good amount of cash, probably more than $2000-$3000, depending on the feature you request from a theme developer, but here you can get this full-fledged project bidding theme, with a price tag starting from just $99.
Use Coupon code PROMO20 and avail flat 20% discount on any theme.
Hi, I purchase this theme and I am start working with them. I really liked your explanation. Thank you.
Hey Marcos,
Thanks for your appreciation, do let me know if you need any help! :)
please can you make it free. please..
Hey Aniket,
It’s not a product created by me, hope you understand :)
Thanks!
This is a great post. Can you please tell which website would do better in Miami (USA) fiverr type or freelancer? Thanks
Dear Pranjal,
Do let me know about after purchase support. And any other custom features/plugins you can add in afterwards, I’m happy to hire.
Thanks,
Nikhil
Dear Pranjal,
I was just wondering, what kind of support and follow up can you offer post purchase. Am I able to hire you directly by any chance for small modifications to the website? It seems almost perfect for my application bar 1 small change I’d like to make.
Do let me know how I can get in touch.
Hey Nikhil,
Sure, you can use https://blogosense.com/contact-us/ to reach me with your specific modification list?
I would be happy to help :)
I am creating a plugin for WP Job Manager.
WP Job Manager – Freelancing: https://shop.opentuteplus.com/downloads/wp-job-manager-freelancing/
Freelancer can give Proposal or Bid.
Store Owner can charge like Upwork/elance etc.
Is there no plugin pack that can do exactly the same job and functions without having to install the Project Theme”?
Hi Finiarisa,
Unfortunately, as of now I couldn’t find any plugin specific for freelance like features however, I’ll update you, if I found any.
Thanks :)
Hello finiarisa,
I am creating a plugin for WP Job Manager.
WP Job Manager – Freelancing: https://shop.opentuteplus.com/downloads/wp-job-manager-freelancing/
You can check this. It is under development.
Thanks
Kishore
Hi Pranjal,
I like most people here have zero technical knowledge. Besides that, I have a question, If I were to start a freelancer site, how in your opinion can I control the freelancer from not approaching clients directly after the first job?
I ask this as I live in a very small market and the chances of this happening are very high.
Thanks.
Hi there Aatif,
I am completely agreed with your words, it happens over existing Freelancer like sites.
Once a freelancer completes a client’s project, changes are high that he maintains private connections with the client and that results in to direct loss of the site’s share.
In such case, there’s nothing much you can do, except that you can strictly advice to the client’s that direct connection with the freelancer can be very risky, and may result in the loss of money. In such cases, client will be responsible for the damage cause.
Hope that gives you some clue :)
Thanks
Thanks for your swift and helpful response. It has given me some direction to work towards.
Hi,
Two questions:
Is it possible to see a demo of this site anywhere?
Would be escrow account be linked to my PayPal account?
Many thanks,
Clive
Hi there Clive,
For demo version of the site click here
And from this link you can check the live demo, as well as back-end demo of the site.
If you’re willing your buyers to send funds from their PayPal account by choosing the PayPal option on the transaction page at Escrow, then here is the little information from Escrow.
https://www.escrow.com/support/faqs/how-does-paypal-work-with-escrowcom
However, I had also reached out to the developer of Project bidding theme, I’ll update you with his reply.
Hope that helps :)
Hi Pranjal,
Many thanks for your prompt response. It helps a lot!
I will check out the demo and also read the information in the kindly provided link about escrow payments with Paypal.
I will look out for any more information updates from the developer also :-)
Many thanks again.
Clive
This was VERY informative for a beginner like me with no software developer skills and tight budget. I had two questions for you: 1. I knew that a business owner can set the location for his/her job, but can job-seekers get the notification or filter the jobs based on their location? 2. If I want to add any feature, like a calendar or map (assuming they don’t exist in this theme), how would that be possible?
Hey Behzad,
Yes, this theme is designed for those who don’t know how to code, and who are running on a tight budget to outsource the system via any developer.
1. Yes, job seekers can get the location notification, by turning on the notification, from their account area.
2. If you want to add any new feature, then you can approach the theme developer, or else you can also hire any freelancer, to get your job done.
Hope that helps :)
Regards
hi, can you please send me direct links of installer of wordpress as i am finding it difficult to find installer filer. i downloaded that software several times but it is not installing.
Hey Priyanka, I guess you’re mistaken WordPress as a PC software, instead WordPress is a web CMS, that requires a web server with PHP and MySQL installed. In order to use WordPress, you’ve to buy a WordPress hosting plan, check out SiteGround WordPress Hosting, for more information.
Hope that helps :)
Hey Pranjal, actually the thing is i am trying to make a site like freelancer and i am not able to make it as i am a beginner and having zero knowledge of it. but still i want to try and just wanted some help.
Hello again Priyanka,
Oh I can understand, your issue.
I wonder at this point of time you know, nothing much about WordPress.
Please let me know, if you need any sort of help, just use the contact form to reach out me. https://blogosense.com/contact-us/
Also from now on I will try to write more detailed WordPress related guides and shoot video tutorials for beginners.
Stay tuned!
:)
Hi Pranjal Gupta, Nice to see your post. Can I have your contact details. I am interested in this website. If all requirements are there in this theme, I would like to buy this.
With best regards,
Howdy Anuroop, sorry for my delayed response.
Well you can use our contact us page, https://blogosense.com/contact-us/ to connect with me.
Thanks
This is a great post. Super informative. Thank you!
Thanks Thomas, glad you liked it :)