Educational Game-Builder Website

The Coder will create an Internet-based interactive website introducing a new concept intended to assist educators working with children. This is a website-based business. This process is interactive between the visitor and the website and involves sequential steps, each one of which when selected will determine the choices presented at the next step. We believe the requirements of this process will exceed the abilities of HTML and will require another software language such as PHP (or others) to work. ## Deliverables Rent A Coder requirements notice: As originally posted, this bid request does not have complete details. Should a dispute arise and this project go into arbitration "as is", the contract's vagueness might cause it to be interpreted against you, even though you were acting in good-faith. So for your protection, if you are interested in this project, please work-out and document the requirements onsite. 1) Complete and fully-functional working program(s) in executable form as well as complete source code of all work done. 2) Deliverables must be in ready-to-run condition, as follows (depending on the nature of the deliverables): a) For web sites or other server-side deliverables intended to only ever exist in one place in the Buyer's environment--Deliverables must be installed by the Seller in ready-to-run condition in the Buyer's environment. b) For all others including desktop software or software the buyer intends to distribute: A software installation package that will install the software in ready-to-run condition on the platform(s) specified in this bid request. 3) All deliverables will be considered "work made for hire" under U.S. Copyright law. Buyer will receive exclusive and complete copyrights to all work purchased. (No GPL, GNU, 3rd party components, etc. unless all copyright ramifications are explained AND AGREED TO by the buyer on the site per the coder's Seller Legal Agreement). * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Wednesday Nov 22, 2006 9:47:30 AM: Thank you for your response to our bid advertisement. We want you to now send us in writing any questions you have about this project that will help you to prepare your bid. Several of you indicated you did not believe we had given enough information for you to properly complete a bid and we agree with you. Please ask your questions through this written process so that we might send your questions back out to the other bidders along with our answers. In keeping with our target deadline of December 3rd for our decision on which bidder to use, time is of the essence. Please respond quickly as you are able so we can work toward a decision quickly. Thanks! * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Tuesday Nov 28, 2006 5:34:38 PM: We would like to thank all of you for the excellent questions and for the time you are taking to “stay with us?? thus far in the process. We have one point of clarification for you that may help in your bidding. We are a small website provider helping a customer create a website that we know needs more sophisticated coding than we are capable of doing. We are looking for someone to do that part of the work. Once the person is selected, we will collaborate with that person to create the whole website. Here are some of the questions we have received in the last few days. QUESTION: “Could you describe the process you would like the system and the user to go through during their interaction.?? ANSWER: Yes we could, in pretty good detail, but to do so would disclose the intellectual property of the site creator. We are a bit reluctant to use the words “Non-Disclosure Agreement?? because when we first posted this bid we insisted on a NDA and got absolutely no responses, no bids, no nothing. As we hope you can understand, when someone creates a new idea for a website that does something that no one else does, it is only natural for that creator to try to “go to market?? with the idea before anyone else does. That is where we are at right now. We would very much like not to lose you as a bidder just because we use the “NDA?? word but likewise we are reluctant to move all of our proprietary information into the public realm where anybody with good coding skills and fast fingers on the keyboard could take money away from OUR idea! What we are trying to do right now is give you enough information to get a solid idea about the website without disclosing the proprietary information, get your bid, then execute the NDA for the bidder we select. We have to turn this question around and ask if you can get en ough idea of the site construction to bid without having every small detail. What do YOU think? Your comments are most welcome. QUESTIONS: “Do you have an example of the questions at your site??? And, “The main thing I would like to understand is the exact process involved. You mentioned that it is an interactive site: what does it deal with, for example, what should the user see when he/ she is using the system??? ANSWER: From the way you are asking this question, we imagine you are thinking it is some kind on online testing site. It is not. Think of a teacher or instructor or tutor looking for some printable resources to use with her students. Think also of storing a great number of images and text content on the website and offering this content through a series of design/layout choices the visitor would select to formulate her output for local printing. We probably cannot get into more detail at this stage without asking you to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order for us to protect the intellectual property of a more detailed answer. QUESTION: “How old are the children? (teens/students/etc)??? ANSWER: The real users of this site will be adults doing things to help them teach/tutor/challenge their student. The children for whom they will be visiting this site could range in age anywhere from preschool to senior high school. The content for the site will be aimed at such children but all workings within the site will be for adults to use. QUESTIONS: “Can you provide an example of internet site, that is similar to the design you want??? “Describe the look and feel you would like- provide URLs for similar sites, if applicable?? ANSWER: The “look and feel?? of the site is fairly straightforward. You could look at a site like [login to view URL] not because we will be doing anything like they do but because it shows a bright, cheerful, colorful site. In re ality, our starting page would have very different content than the Disney page but we would hope would take on the cheerful, colorful appearance. As one would move through the process in our site we would expect ours would be easy to navigate, that the pages would “set up?? quickly and of course that all the code would work flawlessly! QUESTION: “Fully explain the process- is it a series of questions and answers with iterative questions based on previous answers??? ANSWER: Not really. It is a series of choices about the content, layout and printing of information QUESTIONS: “Is there a need to authenticate or otherwise manage users??? and, “Do you need to archive data from user sessions? If so, what type of data-parsing ability do you need??? ANSWER: “Yes,?? on the authentication and management of users. There will be fees charged to “members?? of the site and there will be the need for login name and password capture and storage, lon g-term. The site owner wants the ability to disable a “member’s?? access if the circumstances require it and be able to accomplish that from an administrative “entry?? to the website. We believe it may be helpful or necessary to store some amount of information from the user such as what they created at their last several visits in case they want to reprint their earlier work. The website will have full access to its own (not shared) MySQL database for all of this user-related information. QUESTION: “Please describe the hosting service you plan to use. Many hosting mills do not provide enough access or flexibility to allow for optimal design and coding of online applications.?? ANSWER: Our first choice for hosting is Verio. Their stuff is flexible, has plenty of room as well as the ability to grow infinitely, is reasonably priced, and is pretty well supported (at least compared to quite a number of others we have experience with). We have wide-ranging control over the site from its control panel. We have DNS control over the site. We have access to CGI, PERL, email, PHP, MySQL and a number of other widely known and widely used tools which can be used to the benefit of the website owner and the site visitors. We hope you have had experience with Verio. If not, we can certainly arrange for you to get in and look around, but only after we have a contract for your work. QUESTION: “What are your requirements in terms of scalability and extensibility??? ANSWER: The sky is the limit. We have dreams of being the [login to view URL] of our realm! The coding must factor that in. We have already factored that in when considering our choice of website hosting services. We know we will need to grow this site over time. QUESTIONS: “Do you foresee expansion of the application into other types of functionality??? and, “Do you expect significant growth in your user base??? ANSWER: Good question. Maybe. If we are to proceed wisely, we will get this website up and running and working perfectly, let it run for a while and see where it takes us. But if we do not anticipate future growth and future flexibility in the initial design we would be foolish. QUESTION: “Is there a requirement for content-management??? ANSWER: Good question that we do not have an answer for. We are open to ideas, suggestions on this. * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Monday Dec 4, 2006 8:08:33 AM: We appear to have added additional bidders in the last couple of days and to make sure we are all together, I want to ask if anyone in the bidders list has NOT seen the answers to bidder questions we posted November 28, 2006? If not, please let me know so I can get that to you. For the rest of you, please give us all 24 more hours to get a "yes" or "no" from everyone on this. We have had a couple comments from bidders about not giving out full, detailed information about the website code we want written. Once again, we will be able to give out that detailed information only to bidders who sign our non-disclosure agreement (NDA). I guess we need to be very specific about this: if you will be withdrawing your bid if you have to sign our NDA, would you please let us know within the next 24 hours from the time this message is sent? We really need to know which bidd ers are with us and which are not. Please let us know as soon as possible. Otherwise, we will wait for 24 hours after this message is sent and then begin the final information exchange with the final bidders. We really hope you will go with us into the final round as it looks like you are a well-qualified group of folks. Thank you once again for your work so far. ## Platform The website will run on a hosting farm computer which is probably Linux-based and uses Apache web-server. Visitors must be able to use almost any browser to visit and operate this site.