OceanReady.com aims to match budding yacht crew with racing yacht owners. A yacht owner aiming to race can register their intentions and list the crew vacancies they have. Potential crew members can register their skills and experience and the races they'd like to participate in. When a yacht owner's needs match those of a crew member both get to see the contact details of their match.
The site is completely free of charge, the long term aim is to build a community and increase the services on the site so that, later, perhaps they can sell things off the site.
OceanReady.com was completed to a tight deadline in about five weeks, in time for the start of the racing season, and to a fairly tight budget, and to do that I concentrated on getting the key functionality in place. The site still has a huge 'wants' list, but the core site is up and running on time, in budget, and the client's booked in for a phase 2 development later in the year.
I'm very pleased with the back-end functionality of the site. I used PHP and mySQL as usual, and surprised myself at how quickly I can code nowadays, and how everything just fell into place. I'm sure in the scheme of things it's not terribly complex, but there certainly is complexity in the background that needs to be hidden from the user, for instance, the form to register an owner lists the events held in the database, and for each of those events, the jobs listed in another database table. So when the client adds an event, the registration form automatically changes. When the yacht owner hits the register-me button, the software has to handle that flexible form. That flexibility needs to happen again so the owner can change their registration, and then it happens all over again, but differently, for crew registration. The site required about fifty hours of work to build, a couple of years ago it would have taken me months to build this site :-)
I should mention there's also a maintenance page for the site owners so they can maintain the events list.
The client said "so professional", "We really like the demo page .. you have done a nice job with the position and cutting of the photos and the water banner." and "Great work, go live! We definitely want a slot for phase two.".