Unfortunately this week has brought some tough decisions. After resubmitting the website development project on Rentacoder, we received a good number of interested developers bidding for the work. However, after our last experience we've been thoroughly checking and assessing their past work more thoroughly this time. Even though the price of the project is now much higher, we cannot find a single developer with examples of work that come close to the standards that we're hoping for. Maybe it's because we're so specific and developers have their own set ways of developing. But even still, almost all of the sample work they show us is either full of bugs and general sloppiness, or runs incredibly slowly.

Given this, Brad, Paul and I have had lots of discussions about the pros and cons of developing the site ourselves. In the end, we've decided that in order to get the standard we want at a price we can afford, internal development is really the only way. Now we just have to learn MySQL, PHP, and complex CSS!

On a brighter note, we've agreed on a logo concept and colour scheme for WOMOW. We still have a bit of tweaking to do but we're pretty happy with it at this stage.

We’ve also submitted our business plan for the semi-finals stage of the MUEC competition. Still working on the pitch though. We only have 12 minutes to present and there’s a lot to squeeze in when you consider that we need to introduce the concept of social networking, discuss the concept for WOMOW, explain how we’re going to protect ourselves from sabotage (a big question we regularly get asked), the marketing and operations plans, the financial projections, the risks, etc.