I'm looking to outsource the development of a website to someone on Odesk or a similar service, and I'd like to know what kind of developer to look for and vet.

The website will be a marketplace between buyers and sellers, where the buyers enter all the details of their requests, and the website sends these details to all registered suppliers (who pay a monthly subscription). The suppliers then log into the website, and load in the details of their quote. The buyer then sees a comparison for all supplier quotes, and can make a decision based in factors such as price, lead time, terms, etc.

What kind or mix of web programming languages will best accomplish this? I'd like to work with a developer who is proficient in these areas.

Thanks in advance.

My initial thoughts are to stay away from wordpress etc developers, and to look for a solid php/SQL coder. Front end design is not my main focus right now, it just needs to be a functional MVP. Am I naive to think that once we have a solid back end, that we can develop the front end later to be more appealing for the end user?

Not a programmer, but I believe you need a lot of focus on the back-end stuff. So you'll need someone who can architecture this and it will probably be more than one person.

I will let the other folks chime in as well.

Learn php for starters but I would definitely check out nodejs (javascript) and experiment with it.

Check out http://socket.io/ with nodejs and do some cool websocket stuff

Unless you have a reason, I wouldn't focus on hiring by a specific technology, just find a competent dev and they will be able to guide the best stack to use.

Thanks for the replies. I don't have the time or energy to learn to code from scratch, so that's why I'm looking to outsource.

I was thinking the same thing about focusing more on the back end. If the idea works we can focus on making it look pretty

Number one important thing is to spec your project properly. The less generic it is, the less problems you will have. Draw mocups as far as you can, and have a checklist of everything you need it to do.

This will also attract better talent

I have posted the job here:

https://www.odesk.com/jobs/Backend-D...3274b339959308

I really have no idea how much a job like this will cost, so I'm hoping to get feedback from the applicants to get a good idea of where the market is for this.

McKaig, I built the exact site you're trying to build last year for another start up that is currently based in SF.

Don't expect to have that site built for less than $15k

Or I should say, I bet you could find someone to build a super bare bones version of what you're looking for for ~$5k and 6 weeks on odesk or somewhere. You're going to need to play around with the idea, make changes to the flow, the UI, UX, back end design, etc... moving forward. It's not a good candidate for finding someone on odesk. Your best bet is going to be to find someone technical to help you for a combination of equity/cash locally, otherwise it's just going to be a mess.

From a technical perspective, two-sided marketplace (two types of users, buyer/seller) are quite difficult to do well. There's a lot of complexity to getting the whole damn thing modeled/working/tested well. I've built two, and they're about as tough as standard sites get from a back end perspective.

This.

You may be able to find a basement dweller that will do it for $1k but they most definitely won't have the experience you want for this site to work well and to have a nice user experience.

If you're really looking for a bare bones setup, you might actually be able to set this up with a popular CMS like Wordpress, Drupal, or one of those ecommerce deals like Shopify. They may have enough community software for you to put this together yourself without any back end programming needed.