Making the site

Because we changed the structure from: people support charities to people support projects, and projects are owned by charities, the database and code is under some heavy construction.

Combining this with the situation that our programmer is not able to work full time on Helpalot, the progress on the production of the site is slow. Too slow. This week Derick and I will meet to discuss our options to speed up the production, like involving another programmer.

The goal is still to have Helpalot ready in March, as I will go to San Fransisco then.

Why change the focus from charities to charity projects?

• Charity projects exist in the real world, the old structure could not really cope with that situation.
• Closer line from your money/support to what happens to it.

The relations as they will be in Helpalot

For my mock exam presentation, I fixed the Content & Context flochart.

Click for full picture

Off-topic..

CNN - Mysterious red cells might be aliens

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_in_Kerala

After a redesign, this is the new flow of the pages of Helpalot. The first version was a good start, but a bit chaotic and missing some pages. It’s still not perfect, but good enough for where the project is at the moment.

Flow of pages Helpalot for version 1.0

Flow of pages Helpalot for the test version

Storyboards

I’m also working on storyboards so I know exactly what I’m going to build. Like with the flow of the pages I had a first version and now I’m working on the redesigns. Here’s one storyboard of the Charity Page.

Storyboard - Charity page, seen by visitor

Future Awards

After these 100% on-topic images, I’d like to share with you a little bit of last Wednesday. I was at the Future Awards (Futureawards.nl, Dutch site). Highschool children where asked to design improvement-plans.

They presented there concepts for a jury. Me and Karel where part of the large group of jury members. It was great to hear there plans and be able to provide some sort of consultancy for them.

The enthusiasm of the kids was enormous and they actually had some good ideas and clear presentations. I even had a I-need-to-do-that too-experience, when they where handing out candy to buy my vote.

Karel (left) and me at the Future Awards 2006.

More pictures on the Future Awards ‘zo was het’ page.

Before I can start building, I obviously need to know what I’m going to build. I’ve got a (growing) document about the ideal site and I’m working on storyboards and flowcharts for how a first version of Helpalot should be.

This is my first flowchart of the pages that are needed for Helpalot.

Update: I’ve got a newer version of this flowchart.

For readability I didn’t draw every connections between pages that I could, but only the most important ones.

For these pages I’m making storyboards. At the moment I’ve got 12 pages covered. Besides these storyboards I’m working out details (like search and search results) out in more detail.

Still, I haven’t decided on how I’m going to build the test version. Probably either using Ning, Drupal or Joomla!. Perhaps when you see this flowchart it’s easier to give advice on this choice, so please feel free to comment.

I made a first version of the content & context flowchart. The goal of the chart is to have something concrete to talk about, gaining more focus on the project.

click to enlarge:


The flowchart