Freelance Ireland started in 1999 with the original goal of being a showcase piece for my website portfolio. The coding was originally in PHP3 and MySql and was one of the first large scale websites I worked solely on.

The original idea was take from freelancers.net, as UK based freelance site and to mimic the functionality with some additional features and promote it for the Irish market.

It's been growing steadily and has a member base of about 5,000. It's by no means the largest freelance site, but it is the only one that has successfully taken the Irish market.


Version 2 of Freelance Ireland was updated from the original PHP3 coding and converted over to use an off-the-shelf forum software called SimpleMachines (which is great). This allowed for better administration of the site and more features. Though there was teething issues with the "forum style" functionlity on a project listing web site. With comments and questions, certain features where removed and the design eventually got updated to reflect the original brand.


The existing problem with Freelance Ireland still existed however. Most freelancers were encouraged by the site however few people posted projects directly. This ultimately led to the thinking of doing a complete change to the business model.

Version 3 of Freelance Ireland has completely changed it's 'Business Model' from the previous versions. Instead of being a functional forum or functional based site it was converted completely to a content / magazine style site.

It was converted over to WordPress and integrated heavily with Social Networks.

Previously visitors communicated via the Freelance Ireland forum, they now communicate via LinkedIn and Facebook Groups - this caught a lot more attention from people and ended up resulting in greater response and build a greater freelance community.

The goals of the site is to grow more, provide a better service to freelancers and it's tag is simply;
INFORM, CONNECT AND FIND PEOPLE WORK


www.freelanceireland.ie