Blog-style web site developed in ASP.NET v2

I require a blog-type web application developed in ASP.NET v2, which will utilize the new Web Parts and Theming capabilities.

The main idea/goal of the site is to provide a place for people to record their history month by month, year by year to be able to view it in the years to come. And also to share important news and life moments with friends and family AUTOMATICALLY.

The main menu will have the buttons:

Me – Family – Favourites – Famous – Friends

Under “Me” there would be 5 subsections:

1. Journal – write as much as you like, just like a normal diary, put down your thoughts and daily events. This section is private.

2. Month – write 10 lines of text at the end of each month describing the main events of the month. During the year you can go back to each month and change something if you like.

3. Year – will just list each of the months’ 10 lines of text on one page to give you an overview of the year gone past. Once the year finishes, the user CAN NOT change anything written for the months in that year, so for better or worse, your history has to stay there forever.

4. Photo album – just a place to upload and sort pictures into folders according to time/occasion to be shared with others.

5. Pet – for those who have pets, they can write 10 lines a month for their pet (just like they would for themselves) and that history will also be preserved.

The idea is that for example, if Alice is the owner of the blog, she can invite her friends Tom and Jane and her brother Andy to become members as well. She would then have Andy in the section “Family” and Tom and Jane in the section “Friends”. All of them can see Alice’s monthly diary and photo album and Alice can see their monthly diaries and photo albums. For example, she can log in, click Family, then click Andy and see Andy’s current year written month after month and a link to his photo album. And what happens is that each time Alice writes something in her “Month” diary or changes something she previously wrote, Andy, Tom and Jane will get an alert next time they log in, letting them know Alice has added some news. They can find Alice in their “Friends” section, click her name and see what she has updated or added.

There must also be a facility to send emails. For example, Alice can write an email body in the field provided, then select from the list of all her friends and family who she wants to send that email to and the email gets broadcast to selected members.

The last section that’s a little bit different is the Famous section. There should be a back end admin facility where the admin can add various celebrities. Then each month the admin would read through Hollywood gossip magazines and copy the major celebrity news to their “fake” diary. Then each member can “subscribe” to the monthly diaries of celebrities of their choice to keep up with their lives. It will work the same way as with their friends and family, i.e. every time celebrity news are added members get an alert about it.

The project should include an easy theme selection mechanism (to begin with, a male and female theme would be designed and more added later). Plus it will utilize web parts (or other similar mechanism) to allow members to select several of their favourite friends/family members and display their current news and random picture from photo album on their main page. If this is implemented successfully, it will replace the “Favourites” section (i.e. that section would be deleted).

Plus the usual log in, member details, forgotten password supplementary forms need to be developed.

You will also have to develop a Microsoft SQL back end for this system (most likely SQL 2005 Lite to begin with, later to be upgraded to SQL 2005 Standard).

The client has a marketing strategy in place and they estimate 10000 users in 6 months and growing from there, so both the web application and the underlying database must be made robust enough to support it).

You will have 2 weeks to complete the project + another 2 weeks for the revision where we test and finetune the project before going live. I will expect to get an email from you every day or every other day with a short note on what has been done and preferably a link where I can see the progress of the project. If you do not have an asp.net v2 capable server at your expense, I can provide you with one (I’ll set up the project and ftp details).

This is just the mainframe of the project and once it’s complete and people start using it, the client is more than willing to continue ongoing development progressively adding various modules to it, so if completed well, this can be a very good continuous stream of work/pay for you.

No design needs to be done for this project (it will be completed by someone else), just back end, database and web forms utilizing the new asp.net v2 master page and themes technologies so that the design can be easily overlaid with the forms created by you at the end.

You can reuse code and components from projects you have previously developed or code and modules that can be downloaded from the Internet for free, but please do NOT use any third-party commercial components which I would need to pay licensing fees for.

All Polinet’s future projects would be ASP.NET v2 so this project is just a first step and, looking at the bigger picture, we are really looking to develop a long term relationship with a web development company or individual to subcontract all future work.

Payment terms:

No down payment is offered because I don’t need any jokers claiming they can do it, taking the money and disappearing. But to be fair to everyone, I will split the project up into smaller modules and upon completion of each module you can show me that it works on your server, I will give you part payment for that module, you’ll send the module to me, then you can start work on the next module. So please only apply if you are confident you can do the project and don’t waste yours and mine time if you don’t think you can pull it off.

I prefer to pay through Direct Bank Deposit in roubles (based on the Sber Bank currency exchange rate on the day of payment). If you want to get paid through web-money, it can be done but you would be liable for all associated costs (3% for me to put cash into web-money + 0.8% of transfer fees+ any other associated fees if you want to get paid in WMZ instead of WMR).

We can also arrange escrow payment through Weblancer but again, you will be liable to all associated fees and costs.

When applying, please give links to your company/personal site with portfolio or links to other web applications you have developed in the past. “I can do this job” type of response is not enough for me to assess your knowledge and I would simply disregard it. You can send your responses in Russian and give links to Russian sites as Russian is my Native language but you must be able to understand technical English fairly well so we can discuss the project details in English and I can send you client’s requests and feedback without having to translate it into Russian for you.