OfficeCavalry.com Provides a Brand New Way for Freelancers to Find Projects

London, 18th November 2010: Cyber-Duck, a multiple award winning digital agency (www.cyber-duck.co.uk) has announced the launch of OfficeCavalry.com, a website to connect Freelancers with Project Owners. The site launched with over 3,000 Freelancers already signed up during the initial registration phase with an immense surge of interest as a result of online marketing and PR activity.

The new site allows Freelancers to showcase their previous work and level of skill to prospective ‘Project Owners’ in 6 Cavalry categories: Tech, Creative, Marketing, Support, Accountant and Legal. From here they become accessible by potential employers looking for specialist Freelancers to work with on a temporary basis.

OfficeCavalry.com is the only website that allows Project Owners to search for Freelancers within specialised Cavalries using Cyber-Duck’s advanced search functionality.

The OfficeCavalry.com site is free to sign up and register to and there are a number of unique points that makes it different from other portals. Project Owners can “view and select” candidates or post a project with a pre-defined scope and budget to maintain the highest quality of selection and to avoid a “Dutch Auction” on price, that ultimately drives down the quality of the work. The site also features a rating mechanism and loyalty scheme designed to reward individuals for consistently delivering quality work. 

Most important is the Escrow payment service that ensures funds are held in a secure holding account before any Freelancer commences with a project, therefore if the project is delivered to the agreed scope; payment will be made.

The web based service was founded by Andy Turner and Ian Patrick after significant management careers in large organisations. They spotted a niche in the market and formed OfficeCavalry.com to target the gap. Since 1992, the number of self-employed people in the UK has increased by 15%, and in a world where work is increasingly hard to come by, Freelancing is becoming a more popular option.

The uniqueness of the site is down to the user friendly approach adopted by Cyber-Duck to the entire process, from individual profiling right through to the payment of fees. This makes the prospect much more appealing to those who might not have tried Freelancing before or are simply not highly technically minded. In the past, such portals have been seen as difficult to use, or specifically aimed at technical or design based Freelancers.

“We wanted to create a website accessible to anyone in virtually any industry, allowing those affected by the economic downturn to get into self-employment in their chosen field,” said Andy Turner, Co-Founder of OfficeCavalry.com. “Freelancing is becoming accessible to a wider range of professions, with high speed internet facilities allowing remote communication and virtual work to become a more realistic prospect. We felt that existing sites were not catering well for this new type of ‘non-tech’ Freelancer with both their skill categories and the ease of use of their respective sites.”

Danny Bluestone, MD of Cyber-Duck, the creative and technical team behind the project said, “As with all projects we produce, the user is at the front of our minds from the very beginning. This is clear to see in the final site, with a complex process made incredibly simple for anyone to use. With the Cyber-Duck team making continual improvements to the site based on user testing and feedback, the functionality is only going to get simpler still.”

As well as production and usability, Cyber-Duck is also heavily involved in the on-going marketing of the operation, with significant budgets invested in advertising, SEO and social media to promote the website nationally. A three month pre-registration period has just come to an end and has resulted in over 3,000 members signing up to have early access to the site before it had even launched.

Going forward, the founders of OfficeCavalry.com hope to achieve their goal of getting people involved in Freelancing who would never have considered it before. Feedback is also incredibly important from all members, allowing the technical team to make the site even easier to use.

The exciting new website can be found at www.OfficeCavalry.com