Blog

EngineThemes
September 9, 2016
WordPress No Comments

Key Features of a Freelance Website (Part 2)

key features in a freelance website

In the previous post, I went over core important features that should be cared for in the first stages of building your freelancing website. After getting your site up and running with such key functions, it’s time you considered furnituring your site with supplementary features to attract more users. So this post is about additional features needed for a freelance website.

Advanced Search

This is a basic function installed in almost online sites. Both project owners and freelancers need Search bar to quickly find their needs. They can search by keyword, filter by category or sort by different criteria, etc.

Project Workspace

Having this function will increase working effectiveness between project owner and freelancer. The workspace is where the two will exchange messages, deliver the results, and manage the project progress by status.

With this feature, project owner and freelancer can work and communicate right on your platform and there’s no need to rely on other third party.

Review & Rating

A drawback of working online is that we don’t know the people we work with in person. Feedback system comes in as a reliable source for us to refer to. In a freelancing website, you need this feature available for both freelancers and project owners.

For project owners, reviews and ratings from freelancers they worked with might help other freelancers know their working styles, their attitudes and requirements. On the other hand, receiving positive feedbacks from many project owners is potential for freelancers in getting more invitation to bid in the future. To ensure the reliability of such feedbacks, make it only available for both parties to write review for the other when they finished a project.

Dispute Management

Sometimes things don’t go in the way you want they to. Not all projects are completed successfully. There might be some reasons here and there causing freelancers to want to stop doing the projects or making project owners demand cancelling the job. So, in this case, you need to intervene in as a referee. Should anything unwanted happen during the project, project owner or freelancer is able to file a dispute to you. As a neutral third party, you will consider all the evidence provided to decide who wins and receives the money.

User Dashboard

Each user needs a private dashboard to manage his information on site. In this place, users can edit details of their profile, account, manage all projects, bids and messages.

freelance website - user dashboard

Notification System

Users are not online 24/24 so they need notifications to tell them what happened while they were away. You can setup a notification bar on the website and also email templates to notify users important events like new project, bid invitation, dispute result, etc.

Customize Bar

A quick customize bar in front-end will help you conveniently change style and appearance of key elements on site, for example, header and footer color, body color, heading font, content font size.

freelance website - customize bar

Custom Sidebar

Besides main content layout, sidebars are where you can flexibly arrange contents you want to show to users as a quick reference. WordPress themes can offer you with built-in widgets so that you can easily drag and drop any widgets to an appropriate sidebar.

Translation Support

Usually, if not all, themes are displayed in English language. So translation is requested for websites writing in other languages. All contents on site will be listed in a section for you to translate theme into your own language.

After a new theme version is released, there might be some texts added to site. A good theme will make the latest update of these additional contents in the list so that you can make an instant translation for your website.

Plugin compatibility

A premium WordPress theme could already integrate some popular plugins to make it even more advanced for your usage. That said, there may be many other plugins you want to install in the future. It is good to discover if the theme you’re testing is well compatible to many different popular plugins.

Check Out FreelanceEngine Theme

FreelanceEngine is a premium WordPress theme making it easier than ever for you to build a freelancing website. It is highly customizable with intuitive drag and drop page builder and is equipped with many features to meet your business strategy.

[button type=”buy” class=”btn-shake” link=”https://www.enginethemes.com/themes/freelanceengine/”]Find Out[/button]

Comment

Devices
  • Desktop
  • Tablet
  • Mobile