Making the site

Today I made 100 star-icons, so we can have ratings like on IMBD.

The only thing is that I first uploaded the icons in yellow, and later I made them in blue. Some technical limitation that I’ll ask Jesper (the programmer) to fix for me, limits me to uploading one image at the time. As it is late now, I only uploaded the whole numbers.. so temporarily Helpalot has a rather strange rating where an 6 is in blue and a 6.1 is in yellow stars.

I’ll guess it will be like this for one week, as I’ll be going for my vacation saturday and don’t have any time tomorrow.

Also I updated the overview pages, like the projects overview.

Another thing I did was to work on the ‘add a charity’ flow.

We now have a rather crude flow, and this new flow will guide the user a bit more. Also we will make it obligatory to make a projectpage. We want to lay the focus on projects, it is those that you evaluate and support, that’s where the action is.

Currently it is a bit unclear for a visitor what the difference is between charities and projects and since small charities don’t bother to make a projectpage, you have to search for the charities to find the smaller projects.

When we update our site to include this flow, adding a small charity will require you only to fill in one form, that will set up the charity and projectpage at once. This way, there is no way people can forget to add a project.

Once every charity has a project, we probably want to get rid of the charity-tab in the site. By showing less, the user is automatically guided to what’s most relevant to them; the projects.

I’m always hungry for feedback, so let me know what you think of this flow and about the idea of removing the charity-tab (once the ‘add a charity’ flow is changed).

Since today we now use Lytebox to ‘pop up’ images on Helpalot.

Here is an example.

It looks nice, but it might take a little bit of extra time for the user. What do you think? Do you like it or would you rather see something more basic?

Other progress made lately:
- I’ve improved the lay-out of the personal page and addes some fields.
- I’ve fixed some major IE6 lay-out bugs.
- I’ve improved a number of small details on the news, evaluations and messages part.

Feedback from Sjors:

“Oranje ziet er goed uit, zelf zou ik denk ik gaan voor logo 1 waarbij het beta vervangen is door het riddertje uit 2″

Here’s how that would work:

It works ok, I’m not sure on the size of Sir Helpalot. If the logo becomes small, there is not much left of him.

It might be a good thing is that he’s standing on the word ‘trust’. As if this knight is defending the trust of the charities personally.

Also the logo seems to ‘balance out’ to the right a bit much. Do you think this is a bad thing?

Jesper, our programmer, is taking big steps on implementing new features.

With my day-job and all, I’m having a bit of trouble keeping up with him in speed. I do the interaction design (what needs to be made, how should it function, what goes where, etc), but I’m also working on the front-end.

Here’s a todo list for me:

* Getting the project page right:
— Content of ‘impact tab’ needs to be fixed’ (also in the ‘edit project’).
— Evaluations much more like news on the right (also work for Jesper)
— puting the right look to the news preview

* Getting the personal page right. The whole lay-out needs to change.

* Redesigning the frontpage.

* Redesigning all the ‘overview pages’ (projects, charities, people)

In my interaction designers role; I have to think about what we want to do with Widgets. We want to make it easy to promote your profile and charities on your blog and other sites. So I’ll have to think of where and how we want to add this to Helpalot.

Got an account on Helpalot?

We improved the quality of uploading pictures, so you you might want to re-upload your picture and logo’s.

If you haven’t joined us yet; you can put your charity on Helpalot right now.

We’re working on improving how news works on the projectpage.

We built
- Uploading pictures with news items.
- On the project page you can see a list of the latest news items.
- On a charity page you can see a list of news items from the projects belonging to this charity.

We’re working on
- On a seperate page you can view all the news items of a project, much like a blog. This is partly done. Done.
- On the projectpage you can preview (a part of) the latest news item. Done.
- Comment on a news item. Done.
- Date not working correctly on list of news-items yet. Done. Here an example news item.

I also need to do a lot of lay-out & HTML work to make it look good. We’re also going to update the evaluation system.

Update: I also worked on the charity- and projectpage lay-out. Still somewhat under construction.

Update2: News is now doing what it should do. Still a lot of work for me to make it look good and easy to use. But the functionality is there now.