Question to Robson.....

Well I bought the site from Anthony about a year ago, it was founded in July last year and had been running since then. In the period from July - December it had 98 members and about 3,000 posts if I recall.

If anything the success of talkfreelance is due to a few things, firstly Anthony for coming up with the unique niche (you have loads of design forums and programming ones but none cross over into running your business). Talkfreelance already had an established userbase and I was big poster in yaxay so bringing over more members was very easy.

Then came the collpase of Yaxay, alot of people were bored of it...the staff didn't update the site and it just became a glorified spam hole of advertisements and this probably became the single reason why talkfreelance is here today.

Since then it's just been a case of advertising heavily in related communities, i've had a few big campaigns in design magazines and on websites but no more than $1,500 spent on marketing in the last year.

When I bought the site I changed the design pretty much instantly, I wanted people to see improvements and changes, I think this design is one of the best vbulletin ones around and it was the first design that integrated the header aspect (we now see so many similar designs and copycats its untrue!) A good design is fundamental! This design really attracted people to register.

I think another reason we've kept going is because of the great members and activity, I try and start new threads everyday and all my staff are really good

In the new year we're trying to increase the quality content on the forums by launching weekly articles (a section we never really spent any time on!) also by introducing a weekly newsletter which will be the vechile to send these articles out. These should be introduced in feburary considering i'm now going to be spending the duration of January resiting an assignment

Also, look forward to an upgrade to the latest vbulletin sometime in the new year!

Robson, nice story, and nice new things.
It will be very nice!

Yes, I do agree, this is the best forum design I have seen around.
Its a 100% better then the old one.

"Good artists create, great artists innovate"

it's always nice too see how a forum community can evolve also fun to be part of the evolution. now let's just hope there's still alot of new evolutions coming to TF

Anthony, Rob, jon,

Thank you for sharing the history of TF. As a member, I find this story is very interesting.