I wouldn't take part in this. Just seems sketchy. Because what if you disappear and the model wants to buy her rights back? Not saying you would do this. Just saying, your idea just doesn't come off as legit and innovative. I also know that while building a website is a process, I have mock sites built for my clients within 24 hours.. with stock photos if needed. I just find that you're trying to find arguments that seem more like excuses for not having clear business plan.
Sure, understood. A lot of things seem sketchy, especially over the Internet, and there's always a possibility of someone disappearing. However, there are also legitimate people out there would know what they're doing and they do it well. Something to keep in mind though is that I am stateside (USA), so contracts are easier to enforce. Another thing is that many people won't even offer an "out" option if the person wants their work removed. They've already sold away all their rights, and someone could go put their modeling photo on a milk carton if they cared to. Personally, I buy a lot of freelance material for sites, and even just for personal use. The truth is, I can do a lot of things, but a lot of times there are people that have been in a particular space longer than me, and they can run circles around me. But the cool thing is, I just establish a contract, then develop a good relationship. The relationship is important to me because I can go back to that person when I need to and keep hiring them, and a lot of times they'll do work at a reduced cost to me for repeat business. I even have some people that don't even like to charge me for things because they know me very well and they understand that lot of what I do is for good reasons and to advance certain areas of public interest.
Also, I do mock sites for a lot of other sites, and then just export the content to the "official" site if I need to. As I'm sure you know, this is a quick process. However, to develop a site with what I had in mind, I was really interested in how things would blend, and didn't want to work on color schemes, to include fonts and backgrounds, before I actually had the color scheme from any modeling photos. You've actually done your color scheming really well. More so than most sites. The only thing I did have trouble with, and I know I mentioned this earlier, was that the fonts were just a bit too small and I had to squint a bit to read them. This is probably fine for mobile devices, assuming your site is responsive, and most people would probably just expand them out. However, since I do a lot of work on the PC, it's not really an option for me unless I go and change the settings. Of course this is easy to do, but most people who visit your site with a PC probably wouldn't have a clue. I'm not saying this to pick on you in anyway, because I think your work is top notch. I just think it may help improve things such as bounce rates, and improve the experience for anybody who cared about reading the text.
As far as a development process/business plan, this is similar to something I would do.
- Complete the website build with unique branding
- Develop the social media and integrate it
- Build a user base to add credibility to the site
- Once the first three steps are complete, I can focus on target marketing
With the current system I use, my market reach would be between 14-15 million. I wait to do the first three steps, because when I do this I will have more retention, and I've also had a chance to fine tune the website a bit more to fit user taste, being that a lot of times the majority of users may favor something different than the developer's personal taste.
With that being said, the sheer numbers would drive the site, and I would have incredible traffic during the initial marketing process. I will give an example, but I'm going to shoot a bit low, even though the numbers would likely be higher.
If my draw is just 2 percent of my target (14mil x .02), then I have at least 280,000 people coming to the site. (This will probably be higher, but then again, I am shooting low.)
Of course not all of this is retention, so let's say I have about 5 percent retention rate that will continue to engage the site, and may even follow me on social media:
280,000 x .05 = 14,000
So in a worst case scenario, I have at least 14,000 or so people engaging my site, to include my social media, probably off and on. But realistically the numbers would be higher than this. This might seem like small potatoes in this industry, but I don't need a huge market share, and that 14,000 will continue to grow over time.
There's a lot more to this obviously, but that would be similar to the process I would take out of the gate. This would also establish my brand, and get me a decent position in the search indexes.
But I'm obviously not going to do this at this point, because people aren't exactly embracing me or the idea, and I'm really not interested to upsetting anybody.
Thanks for your thoughts and feedback though. Certainly appreciated. Happy Sunday.