Local Experts #1 — Documenting All Phases of New Project Creation
I have designed and developed a few web applications in my life but this time I have decided to document the process.
Local Experts is going to be a marketplace for Lawyers, Accountants, Translators, Real Estate Agents and possibly more professions in the future. I will be building it primarily for the Czech market but as a multilanguage application so further growth into other countries will be possible. All my previous projects have been built from the get-go as world platforms but this time I am going the opposite direction starting locally first.
Project phases:
- Idea
- Research, competition
- Business Model
- UI & UX
- Development
- Marketing
Idea
The idea is to provide a portal/marketplace where professionals can create public profiles and present their services in the best way and allowing possible clients to search the experts via location, rating, hourly rate, level and type of expertise.
Research
Researching existing products on the market, revealed that there is no such a product on the local scene and the one they are slightly similar do not represent the experts in a way the professionals deserve in my opinion. There are few products on a global market which covers the area from different angles usually focusing on a single profession so global coverage would require a significant amount of resources. (one of the reasons why I am starting locally this time around)
Business Model
The portal will be free to use from start and once it reaches a significant number of professionals and proves useful in bringing business to experts, a small monthly fee will be introduced.
UI & UX
In this phase, I will be designing the individual application views as pixel-perfect mockups. I am skipping the wireframing part as I have the full idea already planned out in my head and as a designer, I just need to get it out into Photoshop files which I will follow in the development phase.
Development
I have developed applications in ruby on rails and PHP before but this time I will use this opportunity to learn Python, possible React as well.
Marketing
Using email marketing to promote the app. to locale professionals, contacting official industry bodies & online media, podcasts, facebook & google ads., social networks.
