Brian Turner

Dear Brian,
Complete beginner at all this - forgive my cheek, please.
I'm the Secretary of a non-profit group of Business Consultants. We are about 50 in number and exist to support and develop our members and to try to generate business leads for them. Our existing web site is good at presenting the public face of the Alliance and holds useful membership information and members' profiles but is very clunky around member communication and provides no forum facility at all. Thus we are trying to address this and, although we havea small budget, would prefer to use Open Source or cheap proprietary software.

The complication is that we want to provide the forums, etc but we don't want to lose the facilities of the existing website.

Do you know of a forum system which also provides (or has a plug in for) a public front end with, for example, public access to member profiles ?

Happy to give you a call if that helps.
Thanks
Greg McMaster
Secretary - Alliance of Business Consultants

Hi Brian,

The following message was on Zoetrope.com, a writing site up towards the top of professional, non-bullshit sites that don't require guild memberships to joint.

I'm sure the money part means little to you, but I thought of you and figure you might be able to use it for your purposes or pass it on.

Lin

I'm the Content Manager of a successful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) dotcom, and I will soon need experienced, reliable freelance writers ("1099" employees) for the categories above. The pay ranges from 5 to 15 cents per word, depending on the subject and length. Most articles will have short (48- to 72-hour) deadlines, and will be from 250-1500 words. If you have samples published on the web, email the URLs, along with your writing resume, to Alan.Baird@TextLinkBrokers.com

Copy the subject line of this thread into the subject line of your email, so I'll know where you found this, but please don't mention Zoetrope or that you know me from here. Keep it professional and convince me that you're good, fast, and really motivated. They tell me the annual business cycle will soon kick into overdrive, so I need to bulk up my go-to list of extremely dependable and eager freelancers. However, just be aware that even if you survive the cut, your first assignment might not arrive for several weeks.

It's also possible that I'll need you tomorrow.