[Imc-tech] Re: donate donate donate.

[David Young]

Umm, not to toot my own horn or anything, but many weeks ago I made
several recommendations for improving the usability of the front page
to the IMC Web site. They are in the archives somewhere.

Perhaps Tech Group should survey users of the Web site? And read the
logs with a mind to find out how people really use the Web site, and to
find out how to help them use the site the way that it was intended?

Dave

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 03:44:32PM -0500, Zachary C. Miller wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
David Young                   On the Job Consulting
dyoung at onthejob.net     Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933