Designing RemoteCreators Platform

Long story short, at the end of February, I launched RemoteCreators.

A small story behind RemoteCreators

Initially, I started working on this project as a job board site back in February 2018 while traveling to Vietnam.

It was paused for some time because I switched my focus to something else, and now it's back on my work desk.

I have some fresh ideas, and I want to try them here. I've already re-wrote the Front-End part and a little bit of the Back-End. So it's more flexible with delivering the relevant content, and it does it smoother now.

I've resumed working on it spontaneously at the end of 2020. Anyway, after two months of working on the core functionality, I'd like to release this beta.

What's Now

Since the first iteration, RemoteCreators has more than 1000 curated freshest creative and Remote Jobs, the Automated Weekly Newsletter, secure Log in, and tools like Rate Finder. I have some users coming in and subscribers already. More people slowly are getting interested in it, although I'm not promoting it in any way and I'm not active on social networks.

I've revamped the look and feel so it looks more up-to-date. To be honest with you, I'm constantly tweaking things here and there. It's like a never-ending journey and a creative struggle in a way, but it is what it is with many creative people.

Features 

Jobs list

I've designed and built an automation that automatically moderates the job list.

Fully Automatic Newsletter

The good thing about RemoteCreators is that it's fully automatic on its own. I've learned how to run automation on my server then designed a simple Email template and made every part work together.

So RemoteCreators gets the latest jobs that it can find, filters them so they are remote and related to design, creates the weekly newsletter using the template I created for it, and sends it on Sunday each weak.

It's not rocket science I know, but I've learned a lot by building this automation. In fact, it was never broken even tho I didn't touch RemoteCreators code for a month — every week I see a new email created and sent automatically.

Perhaps this is core functionality, but that's actually not all that Remote Creators has. I went further and developed some informative and worth-visiting Tools and areas such as...

Rate Finder

So the Rate Finder tool is actually quite cool!

Since designers doing a commercial activity it makes sense to think about it as a business. That leads to market research and this tool helps to do that in a way of simply peeking at real-world project rates.

The nice part about the Rate Finder is that allows you to understand how other designers charge for their work and it's not empty internet guru words — it's the real data.

Projects

It's a new area where anyone can post a project on their own. It doesn't matter which size of the project it is it can be published on RemoteCreators. You can even publish a project without having an account. Although, it's useful in case you want to comeback and change things in your project.

Creators

This is the upcoming area where you can look for creators within RemoteCreators community.

Messaging

Messages is another upcoming feature that will allow you to discuss pretty much anything you want as in the good old days with messengers without any restrictions or robotic moderation. At the end of the day what you're discussing is completely up to you and the only role that tech plays is giving a platform for that in a non-restrictive way.

Remote Companies

This is a simple catalog with remote companies. This one is out for now, but maybe I'll bring it back in the future.

Articles

I've built a content area with a collection of remote work articles for creatives. I'm not the owner of the content. The goal is to make curious people knowledgeable and use this collection to avoid making mistakes on the remote or freelance that others do over and over again.

I've re-designed this area and decided to publish original content in it instead of re-posting other articles, at least, for now. Later, I think I will open submissions mostly for real stories of other creators who want to share and/or don't have their own platform as of yet.

More Tools and Features are coming

There are other tools that are currently in development. I have some really exciting stuff in development now that I can't wait to share and I'm kind of curious myself to see those things running.

Behind the scenes

I've designed this project with code and used simple PHP, HTML, CSS, and JS. No frameworks or third-party solutions.

Any feedback is much appreciated

You're very welcome to visit RemoteCreators and look around. Who knows, maybe it will be interesting to you or your friends.

Thanks for reading until the end. This means a lot to me and... I'm looking forward to hearing from you!