Future Web Development - Appearance & Visual Style

(This topic was split. Sorry for any inconsistencies) - Sentinelrv

Hello all! So as some of you know I’ve been doing most of the web development for Peercoin and Primecoin for the past couple of months.

I’m in the process of transitioning to full time Bitcoin. I’m working on building decentralized storage network called Storj. Will allow you secure and fast file storage, as well as allow you to sell you extra space on your hard drive. Will be figuring out ways to integrate Peercoin once it gets more stable.

Unfortunately, this has taken away much of the time I used to devote to the Peercoin.net website. There are also many other projects like Peershares, Peerunity, and other that need a solid web presence. Not to mention it would be nice if we had some cool games and other web apps to spend our Peercoin.

My Solution
I think we should have 1 to 2 web developers/web designers to build websites and apps for Peercoin on a part time basis. Obviously the priority right now is to fix some of the problems on the Peercoin.net website and revamp the site with the new video. I can happily manage the devs, I just don’t have enough time to do all the code myself. After that we can decide what our priorities are.

Costs
I have about 3000 PPC under my control from the Peer4Commit repo. That should give us about 1-2 months of development from a top notch designer. After we run through that we could figure out how to cover the costs. We could start building web apps the bring in revenue, I also think some solid websites and a good strategy will bring a noticeable rise to the price of Peercoin.

To better manage things I’ve created a Trello board: https://trello.com/b/GJQmtS0g/web-development
And have done a job posting on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Jobs4Bitcoins/comments/27q4hz/hiring_web_designer_for_peercoin_and_related/

Super, during this redesign process, will the new designers be coming to the community here for our input? I’d like this to be as open as possible so the community can voice their concerns or opinions, but I also don’t want the designers to feel stifled. It’s important that the community here is included in the process though.

Also, I’ve talked before about matching up the website with more Peercoin-like colors. Besides our subreddit, I just wanted to show you another example we were working on with the Peerunity client. It would be great if the website could do something similar so we have consistent branding and color themes…

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4111133/Peerunity/images/peerunity-ui-modifications-01

Great, I think it is good to have a professional working on it. To save costs initially we could focus on the essentials (wallet download, links, exchange rate, main video, etc. ) and make it a bit of a portal.
Document repositories, myth debunking, marketing material, lists with exchanges/miners etc. can be just parked on a simple looking sub page waiting to further improve the design and way we want to present them. With a portal, I’m thinking of subpages, or maybe even other domains where people maintain specific areas e.g. for marketing (including videos/presentations, relevant documentation/wiki etc or even a template for Peer4commit projects wanting to have their own website or subpage). It should al be in the same style to have that Peercoin brand all over the place, but can be maintained by different people to share the load.

Just my thoughts.

also it would be great to have in the site the active people behind ppc with roles
and i would expect a second lead dev besides SK :wink:
a well orginized team behind a coin makes it more appealing to the public
see etherium site :wink:

So I found someone pretty good off Reddit. Waiting for him to send me an email to get started on some tasks.

That’s great! Any word on my question below? Looking forward to working with this person!

Using Trello and/or a Peercointalk topic we will make sure the community has direct input.

Great, that’s all I wanted to know for now. Please let us know when this new person is on board so we can start working on this. Thanks! :wink:

Hello, I am working on Peercoin.net on the moment, and wanted to answer your question personally. I will try being active on the forum as much as I can (well, atleast in this subforum).

I’m open for input, and larger changes will be open for comments on GitHub, nothing large/content related wont be merged until everyone is happy with the result.

Currently I’m trying to simplify the front page, making it more friendly for an average Joe. I will split the information into seperate pages and make it a bit easier to navigate trough. This is what I have for the front page right now, It is still an early preview, but I was thinking something along those lines.

Also, when I get the content to a somewhat decent state, I’m going to implement the color changes to match the overall appearance of Peercoin.

Dev site screen cap - Large image

[quote=“TheWildHorse, post:9, topic:2499”]Hello, I am working on Peercoin.net on the moment, and wanted to answer your question personally. I will try being active on the forum as much as I can (well, atleast in this subforum).

I’m open for input, and larger changes will be open for comments on GitHub, nothing large/content related wont be merged until everyone is happy with the result.

Currently I’m trying to simplify the front page, making it more friendly for an average Joe. I will split the information into seperate pages and make it a bit easier to navigate trough. This is what I have for the front page right now, It is still an early preview, but I was thinking something along those lines.

Also, when I get the content to a somewhat decent state, I’m going to implement the color changes to match the overall appearance of Peercoin.

Dev site screen cap - Large image[/quote]

Hi, thanks for joining us here. I just wanted to let you know about this thread in case Super3 didn’t tell you about it yet. It’s a list of things the community wants to see in the new website. It’s more of a suggestion list, not mandatory changes, but you should probably check it out to get a sense of what the community wants to see. Again, thanks for joining us! :slight_smile:

By the way, your link is to a tiny image. Did you link the wrong one?

He linked me that thread, and it is up on Trello as well I believe.
About the image, hmm, let me use imgur, not this horrible upload service that came with the extension.

This link should be fine

Also make sure you click on the image to make it larger, the browser automatically makes it a bit smaller to fit in the viewport.

I believe there was a link in that thread with a previous discussion about content organization. It might be worth checking out for ideas. Also, in case you need access to our high quality logo files, they can all be found in this thread: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2885.0. There are versions with and without the shadow. See the logo in the upper left corner of this forum for an example with the shadow.

Ok, I read the issue, thanks for that.

What I was thinking after reading this is to do something like Bitcoin did…
We basically dedicate the front page, and all links on it to an average Joe, and a merchant looking to start accepting bitcoin. We don’t bore them with details such as mining, minting, proof-of-stake and so on. We explain Peercoin to them in the simplest way possible, and make all the links on the front page be extremely easy to understand, without any knowledge of the underlaying structure. Because after all, those are the people that we are trying to “sell” Peercoin to.

People looking for more information on mining, minting and similar stuff, can find those in the top navigation menu, and maybe 1 link on the front page which will be like a basic introduction to the Peercoin as a protocol and that introduction will lead to more specific pages for more information. The deeper you go, the more details you can get, and more complicated it becomes.

So we basically make a branching system, the further you click into the page the more details the user gets. With that we can also divide users, so a merchant will click to get on a site to help him accept Peercoin, so from that site he won’t be able to wander of to a site on minting, because that is not something interesting to him, and might only scare him off, after all, he doesn’t even have to understand those things to be able to accept Peercoin, he just needs to know where he can Buy them and Sell them, not how they are made.

EDIT: So this is what I think are important thinks that each group needs to know. Tell me if I forgot something.
[table]
[tr]
[td]All[/td]
[td]Avg. Joe[/td]
[td]Merchant[/td]
[td]Cryptofreak[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]What is Peercoin and Cryptocurrency in general[/td]
[td]Wallets[/td]
[td]Wallets[/td]
[td]Mining[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Advantages of using one over the traditional banking[/td]
[td]Where to buy[/td]
[td]How to accept[/td]
[td]Minting[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td][/td]
[td]Where to spend[/td]
[td]Where to sell[/td]
[td]Difference from other crypto[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td][/td]
[td]Advantages for him[/td]
[td]Advantages for him[/td]
[td]How to contribute[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

I haven’t had the time yet to read your last reply. I just wanted to bring over this question from someone in our subreddit…

Has there been any content strategy or user research / targeting? Does the designer have access to the current site's analytics? This should all be tackled before the design phase, and it's the most important part. Sorry if commenting here is not as appropriate as the forum.

[quote=“Sentinelrv, post:14, topic:2499”]I haven’t had the time yet to read your last reply. I just wanted to bring over this question from someone in our subreddit…

Has there been any content strategy or user research / targeting? Does the designer have access to the current site's analytics? This should all be tackled before the design phase, and it's the most important part. Sorry if commenting here is not as appropriate as the forum.
[/quote] No, that might be helpful actually, I will talk to Super3 about it, if he can give me some kind of limited access to google analitycs.

Just an observation: I think Minting should be under Average Joe rather than Cryptofreak

This is because (i) the importance of minting to PPC security and (ii) minting is - or soon will be - both safe and simple

It is healthy and reasonable that even average users understand the need and benefits of leaving their coins in the mint mode

Some feedback on the site design:

I’m not really a fan of the staggered step-by-step Getting Started section and I feel the “Getting Started” text is a bit too large. Maybe implementing the “Getting Started” into a 4-step slider (that doesn’t auto-start, purely slides by click / touchend / MSPointerUp events on “Previous Step” and “Next Step” DOM elements). It cleans up the page a bit more and makes the Getting Started section feel like less of a wall of text. I think I could articulate my design idea for the step-by-step Getting Started “slider” if I could actually work on the mockup. Is this available somewhere as an SVG (I usually use Inkscape for UX work before implementing it).

That said, I think the fonts could use a bit of work. Either the Getting Started and “Original Innovation” flavour text fonts are different or the font simply doesn’t scale well. Maybe double check that the fonts are the same and the font size of the Original Innovation flavour text and Getting Started (ex. the flavour text for “Getting a Wallet”) are the same as well.

[hr]

All that said, I think it is a drastic improvement and kudos to the work done on it. Are there any mockups for the Download Wallet page? Interested in seeing how you approach the design work for that, given the wallet is available for multiple operating systems (and I think for Linux it should point to either the .tar.gz and some basic commands like tar extraction or if PPCoin Wallet is in the respective repos, such as the AUR for Arch Linux, then the commands for getting it from the respective repos).

Ok, due to my last post, I’m back to the drawing board, so I probably will ditch the whole step-by-step thing.

And yea, I will add the minting to average then.

@TheWildHorse

just wanted to say, great that you are working on the website. hope you enjoy working with peercoin!

[quote=“r00tsical, post:19, topic:2499”]@TheWildHorse

just wanted to say, great that you are working on the website. hope you enjoy working with peercoin![/quote]
Thanks for the support, I’m currently trying to figure out how to arrange the content on paper, I got a general idea, but I want to make sure I have everything sorted before I start billing hours.