Making the site

We now have 250 user profiles on Helpalot. A nice milestone

We now have over 100 projects on Helpalot. Mariana added a number of projects that pushed the site over the 100 mark.

I’m starting to track, in a very low-tech way, how well Helpalot.org shows up when you search for some keywords.

Goede doelen

• Dec 27th 2007: page 21, item 3
• March 30th 2008: page 10, item 2

Goed doel

• Dec 27th 2007: page 28, item 5
• March 30th 2008: page 7, item 10

Charity project

• Dec 27th 2007: I didn’t track it..
• March 30th 2008: page 10, item 3

The growth of the site on these dates
December 27, 2007: 190 users, 81 projects

March 30, 2008: 210 users, 210 users, 97 projects

These figures show Helpalot is still rather small, but it also shows that there is growth.

In theory there is a feedback loop that should help us. The more people find and use Helpalot, the more content we have for Google to index and this increases the chances of people finding relevant information on Helpalot and clicking the search links. This increases the ranking for us on Google, making us more findable. And that’s without making use of external databases or seeking media attention.

The problem is that at the moment we only have a piece of the long tail of charities, and that will be somewhat relevant to some people. It would be better to have a cluster of projects around a theme or location, to make the site highly relevant for some people. That would kick off the feedback loop a bit stronger I suspect. So while all are welcome, we try to focus on getting more projects based in the Netherlands and perhaps it’s also a good idea to focus on projects in a certain category. Any suggestions?

More improvements:

• Improved ‘my overview’ page. You can do more from this page now (add news, edit project, etc). Also the lay-out has improved a bit.
• Improved system messages. A warning icon and a red color for when something goes wrong and visa versa for when things went ok.
• Flow improvements; when you just created a charity or project, you get a more useful page to see.
• Some lay-out tweaks, for instance on the ‘upload logo’ page.

We now have 190 personal profiles.

Help us get to 200 before 2008; visit Helpalot.org and join.

The numbers of Helpalot use for 21 may 2007.

Excluding ourselves and Sir Helpalot, we now have:

• 13 projects
• 21 charities
• 44 personal profiels

We have charities and people from:

• Belgium
• Canada
• Ecuador
• Germany
• Ireland
• Nethelands
• South Africa
• UK
• USA

We are constantly updating the site, almost daily. Today for instance, the frontpage just got a bit more informative.