I have an habit of walking around with a little notebook in my back pocket. Wherever i go, whether it’s work, a party, shopping or eating I always have this book for those ‘aha!’ moments, then i would write the ‘aha’ idea down.
Roughly two weeks ago while going through my little notebook for an half baked idea that would get me out of a rut it came to me. There it was! So many person’s like myself are looking for a job right now, now would be a good time to take on this project.
After doing a quick google search and finding no such site focusing on the Caribbean, I assumed the opportunity to be up for grabs.
Now being one with very little resources I passed the idea by my friend Tony and we fleshed out the idea. I built the search functionality and results page in a night by doing some SERIOUS modification to the back-end of wordpress.
What I aimed to do was to:
- Build the site around a single main feature:
As you see you can’t do much else besides search for jobs. Other than that I managed to add the subscribe to search by email with the help of feedmyinbox. Future features are dependent on the response from our visitors, that way we don’t waste precious time and resources building useless features just to find out later that they are, well, useless.
- Build it simple
The most annoying thing about most job sites is that dropdown category box. What if I’m IT technician looking for a job in a retail company, do I select the IT industry or the retail industry? will the retailer list the job in the IT industry or the retail industry? Is there an it job in another industry that I may want to look at? . You get the picture. it’s counter productive. So for the search function we built no dropdown boxes. Think of it like google, if you’re looking for a job in marketing in st. kitts just type ‘marketing, St Kitts’ and hit the enter button. You don’t even need to click on the keyword box to start typing, once you’re on the home page the curser will automatically be in the search box.
- Build it with Functionality first, prettiness second.
The overall look of the site was inspired by Alistapart and blog.txt by Scott Wallick. 80% of my time goes into the backend of the website the rest goes into graphic design and red bull breaks. That way no one should come come to the site and say “oh this looks gorgeous, now if it would just work”.
All that being said I’m looking forward to the next couple o’ months. I’ll be using this page to basically give you behind the scenes update as we work on improving this website so if you have any suggestions or just want to keep abreast of whats happening Subscribe to the feed.