Entoure Website – Phase One

The Project Begins… – 4th January 2010

After hours of meetings between the client and ourselves, we had a clear and concise website brief at our fingertips ready to be put into action. The website has been assigned a turnaround of 6 weeks, so the deadline is going to be fairly tight but our design and dev team is confident that they can work towards a timely delivery.

We’ve mapped out the following objectives for the website:

1. Simplify the transaction process – from our meetings, we came to a mutual agreement between ourselves and the client that the transaction process on the existing site was far too excessive, and was hindering the overall usability of the website. Our mission here, was to create a vivid call to action scheme so at the first point of contact, the primary donation button could easily be located. Secondly, we wanted to make the donation/transaction process painless, effortless, and flawless! At the moment, it takes the user through approx. 15 screens before the transaction is completed.
2. Internalize the Entoure community – The entire Entoure business model is centralized around community, that being people signing up, having a bit of fun and promoting awareness for a noble cause. The dilemma with the old site was that there was no way to channel the user interaction (sans social media, of course). The client wanted something innovative, something powerful. Something that would keep people coming back! We’ve decided to integrate an experimental wordpress component – BuddyPress – which is still in its beta phase. This new website component will allow on-site interaction between users, in a newsfeed style format. Sort of similar to Facebook. There will also be more control over content and make events easier to promote.
3. The Hero page – When discussing the re-design of the Entoure website, we realised that when event participants sign up for event, they have no way of promoting themselves to the direct Entoure community. That’s why we’re going to create a “Hero page”, something along the lines of the social media profile, that will display blogs, status updates as well as a money counter so users can view heroes, sponsor them and keep up with their progress during the event.

The above three points outline the primary objectives, and it might be noted that these proposed features were completely new to our design and dev team at Websalad. Excited to kick things off, Chris has whipped up this pretty little mockup of the home page:

Time for an update – 20th January 2010

We’ve been going for a few weeks now, and the design is looking great. Our design was exactly to spec as per the original wireframe drawn up by Chris. The client has come back with a lot of changes but this is a stock-standard part of the design process. At the moment, everything is running swimmingly.
One hurdle we’re facing at the moment though, is BuddyPress. It’s an awesome plugin, with amazing potential, but we really are taking the bull by the horns here because the plugin is still in its beta phase. What does this mean? Lots of bugs, lots of hand-coded components. It’s ok though, we’re managing to weed these out one bug at a time.

In the preceding weeks, We’ve encountered a couple of design changes however settling on a wireframe was pretty easy. As you can see, it’s a little bit different to the original:

This is the mockup of the home page the Chris whipped up:

The design on the dev server is exactly to spec. We’re working on some site-wide issues at the moment, as was mentioned… Bugs. Horrible stuff but it’s got to be done. Stay tuned for phase two!