TaskHive – Freelance Services Marketplace WordPress Theme
The freelance market is a lucrative one, especially in the era of a new normal where most of us are confined in the comfort of our own home. Working from home has various demonstrable benefits, such as flexible working hours and the potential to earn more money than a comparable desk job.
Nowadays, there are various platforms to find freelance work or sell your digital products or services, for example, Upwork or Fiverr. As freelancer portals, they offer complete features, such as posting jobs for employers and the ability to bid on posted jobs for freelancers. They also cater to a wide range of freelancers offering various services, from content writing to developing websites and mobile apps.
But what if you want to build a similar service? Say, you want to build a marketplace that offers fixed-price service or digital downloads specifically for designers because you find that the aforementioned platform is too restrictive. Building such platform is a lucrative business – you can take a cut from freelancers working from your platform.
Enter WordPress, the versatile content management system that is well-loved by developers and users alike.
With WordPress, you can build almost all types of websites, including a full-fledged micro service platform. There are a few themes and plugins you can use to make this happen, and one of the most recommended themes is TaskHive from HivePress.
What is TaskHive?
According to HivePress, TaskHive is “A lightweight, clean, and modern WordPress theme that allows you to build an online marketplace of services or digital downloads, such as Fiverr or Creative Market.”
True to the description, this theme transforms your vanilla WordPress installation into a full-fledged freelancing platform.
Features of TaskHive
TaskHive is fully featured both for employers seeking potential freelancers and freelancers selling services alike. There are listing views for employers, which show services that are being sold by the freelancers. Clicking a listing entry shows the details of the listing and a message button to contact the freelancer selling the service directly.
Reviews
To distinguish between good and bad service, employers will need to see and leave reviews. With a comprehensive review function as an add-on, TaskHive also excels in that regard.
Notifications
The feature set for employers looking for service is even more complete with the notification function, which will send a notification to the employer if there is a listing suitable for their needs. The notification feature is available as a paid extension.
Sell Digital Products or Services
For freelancers, the feature list is even more complete. TaskHive allows freelancers to sell their digital products by using listing attachments. This feature is handy for sites catering to programmers and web designers – freelancers can sell their completed templates or programs directly on the freelancing platform you build, and support the product through messaging feature.
Payment System
Through the easy to use interface, freelancers can also request payment for their completed work or sold services easily, and view statistics for their services dating back to 30 days. To maximize earning for site operators, there are several features that could be used in TaskHive, such as setting the commission rate for freelancers and requiring upfront payment for each freelancer service listing.
WooCommerce Support
TaskHive is also compatible with WooCommerce, the most popular WordPress e-commerce plugin. This means that adding a payment gateway for easy PayPal or credit card payment, selling products as digital downloads, or even offering fixed-price service is even easier.
You don’t need to use WooCommerce if you don’t want to, but the compatibility gives extra flexibility for your freelancing platform going forward.
Extend Your Website With Extensions
TaskHive is extensible through the use of extensions, which allows for a greater set of features. For example, site operators can enable logins through third-party services, such as Facebook, and allow users to keep a favorites list of listings.
TaskHive extensions are managed through an intuitive screen in the admin screen where operators can enable or disable certain extensions easily. Be aware, though, that you might need to pay for certain extensions.
Easy Customization
Of course, being a WordPress theme, you can also customize TaskHive to your needs with relative ease. You can change the homepage layout, adjust colors, and use your own graphics. Custom page templates are also doable, and you can edit the underlying CSS and PHP files of the theme if you feel comfortable with coding.
Localization Support
If you plan to cater your freelancing website to overseas users, you might need to localize the user interface of your website to the particular language of your target market. Fortunately, translating and localizing TaskHive is easy. You just need to install Loco Translate plugin from the WordPress admin panel and start translating from there.
Plugin Support
The support of TaskHive is also excellent. TaskHive is powered by HivePress, a versatile directory listing theme. It means that TaskHive enjoys the same quick update policy as HivePress, and supported by the same company that built HivePress. The license of TaskHive also comes with 1 year of automatic update and premium support, as well as usage rights for unlimited sites.
Conclusion
With the solid feature set, it is no wonder then that TaskHive is trusted by more than 1000 websites in the world. In the Support page of TaskHive, there is also an avid community that can answer most of your inquiries about TaskHive, from installation to advanced usage.
Compared to various other WordPress freelancing theme options, such as MicrojobEngine and Jobster, the beauty of TaskHive is its ease of use, great customization options, good support and community backing, and excellent feature set.
In short, if you want to build a freelancing platform easily without needing to spend a lot of time writing the backend from scratch, you won’t regret going with WordPress and TaskHive.
With TaskHive, you can build a freelancing platform in a breeze and customize it later to fit your needs. The support backing this theme from the maker and community will also help you if you run into issues when deploying or customizing the theme.
