Last week we mentioned that we’re working with a visual designer to refine the Guild’s look and feel, beginning with logos. Round 1 was here (thanks for the comments & offline feedback!)
Todd has since iterated on a narrower set (click to see larger):
Again, your thoughts and feedback welcome!
Happy to say we’re working on an aesthetic refresh of the Parents Guild site, blog and logo. We selected Todd Linkner to lead the daunting effort, and we’re happy we did, he’s amazing. We have no plans to change key functionality but lots of plans to refresh and “upgrade” the look and feel. And we want to take you along with us, invite your feedback, on the redesign progress.
We began with logo and brand definition. Here are some considerations:
• reflects the brand attributes
• is appropriate to the audience and subject matter
• communicates the Parents Guild’s persona
• differentiates the Parents Guild from its competitors
• is immediately recognizable, unique, and memorable
• provides a clear and consistent image of the company
• is legally protectable
• has enduring value
• works well across media and scale
Todd presented us with the following logos to consider (all in black & white, color to be added later). Click to make large:
Your thoughts and feedback are welcome!
Today is quite the milestone. We decided to greet March with our first experiment in advertising. We’re giving Google Adsense a test drive first, though we also opened an account with Amazon Associates.
So far, we’ve learned:
In any case, as always, let us know what you think! Notice them? Bad, good, other?
As of today, Parents Guild (still in beta) has:
Since our “soft” launch on Facebook a little more than a week ago, the site’s gotten:
About half the traffic is direct (just typing in http://parentsguild.com in the browser window or clicking on a bookmark), and most of the rest is coming straight from Facebook links.
Most importantly, the quality of the posts – the questions and answers – has been astounding. I’m learning something with every one, and I’m hoping you feel the same. Thank you contributors! (And keep up the good work!)
As always, keep sending us feedback (either post feedback online or email us) – your biggest gripe, your best moment so far, what’s working, what’s not… anything and everything. It’s much appreciated.
We’ve created a new page on Facebook for Parents Guild where we’ll be posting updates and inviting feedback. If you haven’t already, consider becoming a fan of the Parents Guild page on Facebook to help show your support and spread the news of our existence to your Facebook friends!
Thus far, the Facebook page for Parents Guild has 30 fans, which is slightly less than our actual site, at 48 users.
(Also, follow Parents Guild on Twitter if you like.)
Categories: Process
Tagged: facebook, social network, twitter
know that parentsguild.com is now live and has a new, working (we think!) registration system to manage signups.
There’s a lot of basic stuff left to do, but if you’d like to kick the tires and start trying to use the thing, by all means, have at it!
In addition to the new registration system that lets you start creating questions and answers, you’ll see that we’ve also set up a system with User Voice to help organize and make publicly-visible any and all feedback. We’re hoping for *lots and lots* of feedback, and we’re trusting that the same community-spirit we’re depending on to make the site successful will make the User Voice feedback and feature prioritization successful too. Which will make the site successful. You get the idea.
(We’ll be emailing the folks who responded to our pre-alpha request for signups shortly, but wanted to open the gates to an even smaller set of folks first – namely, those who chance to be reading this who can summon the effort to click through ;)
Categories: Process · Site
Tagged: feedback, initial launch, kicking the tires, Site, user voice
As we plunge ahead with 18 smallish items remaining before getting a very small circle of folks using the very raw site functionality as-is, it probably bears commenting on why we’re choosing to do development this way – iterating in ever-wider circles of functionality, polish, and users.
The reason is that we both believe in this:
“Only slightly more than 30% of the code developed in application software development ever gets used as intended by end-users. The reason for this statistic may be a result of developers not understanding what their users need.”
– Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, “Contextual Design: A Customer-Centric Approach to Systems Design,” ACM Interactions, Sep+Oct, 1997, iv.5, p. 62.
And this:
(see slides 20-23)
Finally, our meta-goal for release cycles is:
“If you aren’t embarrassed, you waited too long to release.” – Dharmesh Shah / Kent Beck (not sure of the attribution)
Luckily, at the moment, there’s no fear of us not being embarrassed ;)
Categories: Process · Site · Uncategorized
We were mocking pages up on paper, and then in CSS directly, when I realized I was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get details to look good / different / better when other key pages failed to exist entirely. Drum roll – enter Balsamiq.
I’m mocking up plausible wireframes in seconds now. Faster even than with a pencil. Thanks Balsamiq!
Here’s an example mockup from their site:
YouTube mockup by Balsamiq
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