MasterFind Recruitment Software Website

Why did I develop this? What were my goals?

The MasterFind website was used to market the recruitment software MasterFind I had developed over several years. It was my first website so it was exciting to let the world have the opportunity to use it. MasterFind is desktop recruitment software.

This is where I first learnt to develop a proper, professional website. It was very important that it's fast, with good on-page SEO and it had to have many pages with lots of information about my recruitment software. My potential customers are from all over the world. I learnt about branding, marketing and sales points. So the website had to support all this.

What tech stack was used?

What did I learn?

I learnt many things in doing the MasterFind website. It was a business and developing and maintaining this website was part of each day. I learnt mostly about branding and marketing. But it's also relevant to creating good websites. Getting a good designer is important. Having a good style guide for a website helps the website look much better. Little basic design concepts like primary and secondary colors and good, consistent spacing. And a good font. A good name and a good logo. And project management and time management were other skills I was forced to be better at.

Apart from the MasterFind website, the MasterFind recruitment software is something I am very, very proud of. It has been used by hundreds of employees in recruitment businesses over a few decades and was very well designed software. It is software that is powerful and easy to use. It is still being used today.

I developed MasterFind for over a decade and it's where I really learned about structuring feature development plans, versioning, sales, and many things. It took a lot of dedication and was a project I really enjoyed doing.

Branding and Website design

Starting with the name, a name is very important. MasterFind suits recruitment and is a very good name. A name must somehow match what your brand is about.

Branding and choosing a logo that fits the mood, attributes of a brand is important. Choosing a primary color and secondary color and other colors is needed after the logo is done. Having too many colors as branding is a mistake. And too many colors on a website is also a mistake.

Knowing all this has helped me make better looking websites and also to know how to structure my CSS code better.

Getting a good designer is important for a website. Creativity, spacing and font make a huge difference to a website. Don't get sucked into putting shiny things on a website. Have consistency in the design. The design must reflect the brand.

A style guide is needed and it must come from the designer. Base your CSS on the style guide. You should have classes based on branding. eg .button-action.

I found designers on freelancer.com. Freelancer.com is a bit hit and miss, you can waste a bit of money with the wrong people. I found designers and people to help me write copy.

The masthead is super important. 'Above the fold' gets the most eye traffic. It must tell the user immediately what your website is about.

Good, catchy slogans and good copy are also very important. Catchy slogans make a big difference in marketing and on your website. It takes creativity, brainstorming and trial and error. I tried various copy and used A/B testing software and Google Analytics to measure results of different mastheads and different slogans and landing pages.

I learnt a lot about SEO. Mostly that off-page SEO is the most important. The right keywords are super important.

Google adwords was used for advertising. I learnt about keywords, how the bidding on Google adwords works, and keyword campaigns.

PHP and more technical things

PHP can write to a local text file on a web server, Javascript can't do that. It's useful for writing form field data like contact details. PHP can also send an email from the frontend without needing a server to do it. Javascript can't do that without Node or another server.

Shared web hosts can be pretty nasty. I never got great on-page SEO rankings despite trying many things. I was competing with some big competition but I also suspected that these shared web host boxes are too cluttered for good speeds. I've experienced slow load speeds. Default web server settings they give you are not so good and hard to configure.

Bluehost uses Apache. You can configure a little. Bluehost static site hosting can have some custom options. Every site has it's own htaccess file but you can't alter the overall webserver settings. By default, there is no caching - but you can set that up.

I learnt how to make websites responsive.

To make it easier to understand, the main parts of a HTTP request are:
• req.location
• req.method
• req.headers
• req.body
• res.statuscode

Miscellaneous lessons learnt

There were so many things I learnt from selling MasterFind to many customers and launching this website. Too many to mention. Here are a couple other things I learnt.

Spam from my contact forms significantly reduced with a simple honeypot field. There are scripts that look for contact form pages and fill in the fields. Simple scripts were being used to send spam.

BlueHost was my web host initially, I then moved the website to a box I have on Linode. I do all the Linux admin myself.

CrazyEgg and other software was used to test masthead and track user mouse movements. I learnt later that some of the software actually slows down your website and should only be used for a short time.

Googe Analytics was used to track user traffic and webpage analytics.

I also learnt that I don't really like the business side of things and I don't like running a business. I prefer to be in a team, not working for myself. Business admin and marketing is boring to me. I want to have a little more structure.

What challenges did I face? And how did I overcome them?

I could write a lot about this but I'll keep it simple and without getting into the reasons why it succeeded early but later, I had to finish with the business. Having your own business is very hard. You have to do a lot of things. You have to look after the finances, admin, marketing, sales, day to day operations. I persevered with it. I struggled through it. Gritted my teeth and never gave up. Things improved along the way. Routines were made, procedures got better. I used Project management software. I spoke to smart people. Things like setting up email and stopping spam and rude and annoying customers. I put on a friendly front always. I dealt with it even when it was frustrating.