[Imc-tech] Re: donate donate donate.

[Zachary C. Miller]

Sascha I agree that it is really important to redesign our front page
to make certain important things stand out.

I envision that the first thing people should see when they visit our
main page is strong large bold eye catching aesthetically pleasing
links to donate, publish, groups, volunteer, and calendar. I really
think the links we have now are much too small and obscure and people
don't know those useful features are even on our site unless they
really explore. 

We might also want to have a donate link at the end of every story. 

At one point Danielle was fairly excited about getting to do this
redesign for us. If she is still interested we should take advantage
of her skills. If not we should have someone else do it. 

Given our current state of CVS limbo I think the best approach would
be for the redesigner person to just grab the HTML from our front page
with "view source" and edit that HTML and send it back to us as a
static file, and we can cut and paste and merge into the actual PHP
code.

As far as I have noticed, we haven't gotten _any_ money donated from
paypal. This seems kind of weird. We need a marketting push of some
sort on the web page to really encourage people to drop us $5 here and
there.

And our paypal account balance is private secure information. There is
no way we could include that on our server in any automated way
without hard coding our paypal password somewhere in our code which we
absolutely would not want to do. And even if we did it would be a
non-trivial task to parse the account balance out of the account info
page and include it on our page. Anyway, we will routinely want to
sweep our paypal account clean by transfering the funds to our regular
bank account I would think. 

One thing we could do is have a manually updated thing that has our
"total online donations" or "total donations" or whatever that could
be set up so that a fundraising person could update it from time to
time. We could write a little CGI thing that creates a little
thermometer image that fills up as the number goes higher, especially
if we had a fundraising goal. This kind of project could probably be
thrown together in Perl in about 2 hours or less. 

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet - Ya Basta!
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology