WP Questions, a site where WordPress experts can answer WordPress questions for money
Darren Hoyt and I have launched a new website. My ideas about this site grew out of m frustration with Experts Exchange. I’ve written about the evolution of my thoughts over on the WP Questions blog.
Darren has written a summary of everything that WP Questions is, and isn’t.
We used the Symfony framework to build this site. I’ve written a somewhat technical post, over on Symfony Nerds, explaining why this was a good choice for us.
The site took Darren and I about a month to develop. I thought about the right structure for the database during the last week of October, and we got to work in early November. We both took a month long break from doing work for clients, and pretty much just worked on this site, full time, for the month. Our focus was a minimalist but sufficient feature set, a clean design, and a database structure that will be flexible in the face of future changes (among other things, I was wary of too many foreign key relationships).
This last spring I was thinking about question and answer sites where money might be exchanged. On May 5th, I wrote this in a email:
“I’ve the easiest time imagining building out a site for a particular niche… Personally, I’d love a site devoted to programming, where I could put up a question for $20 or $30. Just this week I lost 4 hours tracking down an obscure conflict in the Javascript used on a site – one script was used to fix the PNG transparency problem in IE6, and another script, which preloaded large images used in rollovers, was triggering the first script too often, adding extra images to the page. I would have loved to pay $25, or even $50, to let some IE6 specialist tackle that one. I could imagine being a customer of such a site.”
Our first day went well:
1,389 visitors
200 users signed up
A few paid questions
We are starting off focused on a small niche: web developers who use WordPress. If the site is successful, we will roll out similar sites for other, broader technologies: Java, Ruby, Rails, Grails, SQL, .NET, Oracle, etc.
As I said today on our blog, in reaction to user responses:
I’ve been working on websites for 10 years, and I’m very pleased with how our first day went – much better than average. We received a lot of valuable bug reports and thoughtful feedback. I was pleased to see some questions posted. Our fees are 9% plus 50 cents. PayPal takes about 3% and 30 cents, so our net profit from yesterday was less than $10 dollars, but, hey, that means we made more on our first day than Twitter made during its first 2 years. Which leaves me hopeful that we are, in fact, offering a service that provides real utility to people. And as we listen to your feedback and implement the better ideas, we hope to be able to offer an even greater service in the future.