Making the site

www.helpalot.org

28 projects
37 charities
100 personal profiles

We are now updating the site regularly again:

Things we’ve done;

- Improved message system
- Improved the tabs (no more I-frames)
- Improved use of images
- Improved search speed (but we did move to a slower server, so we’re not as fast as we’d like to be yet)
- Improved the “add a charity” flow
- Improved a lot of ‘behind the scenes’ code, for instance for evaluations.
We now show a nice short list of how many people, charities and projects we have on Helpalot:

• Projects: 23
• Charities: 34
• Users: 91

In the end it’s all about the projects. You evaluate projects, news items (with pictures) can be written for projects, and it are the projects that you support.

Since we made it possible to put a lot more information on project pages, Fabien has been our first person to really make use of these new possibilities.

Here’s a list of upcoming features and fixes

- More information for the overview pages, more information for the homepage. Things like ‘last updated charitiy’ for instance.
- improvements on the ‘my page’, showing for instance the latest news items of the charities you support. Update: working on it, the information is there, but I still need to improve the lay-out.
- Forgot pasword solution. My colleague at work has not been able to login for the last couple of months (fixed)
- Alphabetic lists.
- More details on money spending (pie-charts).
- Google maps to show where the charities are at.
- View all support, view all managers, view all charities, etc. This allows us to clean up the project/charity/personal pages and leave the surplus to ‘view all’ pages.

I think, when we are at the Alphabetic list point, and the lay-out of some pages has improved, we have a pretty nice site. That will be the point that we want to really aim for more content.

Perhaps you can help us with that; join Helpalot, add a charity you know, or perhaps you can get us in contact with other portal sites or organisations that could share their information with Helpalot.

We now have the evaluations system up and running, and for instance for the Disabled Support project, Fabien has evaluated her own project. In a way I think every voice counts, but it’s obvious she will rank her own project with the maximum score of 10 out of 10.

It is also possible for Fabien to invite someone to help her manage a project. Like she did with Woman Developments, Paul Knight is helping her manage that page. Should Paul be able to evaluate her page? If you can find 100 people to help you manage a page, should they also be able to evaluate? I also don’t want people to strategically nót help to manage just so they can evaluate the project.

Perhaps the best thing to do is, to make it possible for everyone to write an evaluation with a score, but to exclude managers from the average rating, and to put a symbol or text with the evaluation that indicates it was written by a manager. What do you think?