Critical Evaluation and Reflection

All in all, I think that things have gone well for this project.

There have been some setbacks and problems - some that were my fault such as letting work creep up on me in first semester and some that were unavoidable such as misunderstandings between me and the charity that cost time - but the vast majority of these problems have been valuable learning experiences. One of the greatest advantages of doing a project like this is how independent the project is compared to previous assignments. I've gained valuable experience working by myself and with external clients that will be very helpful in the future.

I'm quite happy with the website I produced in the end. I have met most of the major goals that had initially been set and adapted my attention as the priorities of the charity and myself shifted across the project. The finished product is responsive, clean and has plenty of room for the charity to expand the website in any way they see fit.

There are some things I would have done differently or would like to have had more time to work on. While I'm mostly happy with the overall theme, there are several individual pages that I'm not quite happy with. There are various reasons for this, but time was the major factor. There were over a hundred pages that I had to convert into the new standard and many of them were large pages that took a considerable amount of time to do. Add to this lack of time I had to contend with the limitations of working within the Wordpress CMS editor and I had to make everything so that it could be easily edited by the charity - meaning that I had to keep "fancy" coding to a minimum in the actual pages.

Working to these conditions and not having as much time as I would have liked is why I'm not quite happy with some of the pages. Beyond wanting more time to fine tune and tweak the pages and theme though, in the end I'm happy with my project.  I've met my main objectives, gained valuable experience, learned several new tricks and produced a product that the charity is very happy with.

Finished

And I'm done. I've been through all of the site that I made edits to - the vast majority of it - and everything is looking good!

Up!

I've just finished copying all the content over from the test site to the main site and everything seems to be working fine so far! I've got a few more things to check over tomorrow and then I'm going to put the site back into live mode and start working through a more thorough test. For the most part all that I really have left to do here is minor tweaks and making sure that everything is working the way that it should.

Almost there

I've just finished stage two of my previous plan. The main chunk of work here has been formatting and updating the pages containing information about current and past residents of the sanctuary. Far from difficult work, but updating and reformatting a list of 66 past residents followed by another 20-odd for the current ones took me a fair while to slog through.

I've also been at work updating the website's e-shop and the events diary, importing new and old data to fill these out.

Live server

The WooCommerce modifications required a fair bit of reading up on the PHP behind the plugin, but once I'd wrapped by head around how WooCommerce worked it wasn't a massive bit of coding to add the functionality that the charity was looking for.

The popups for the Staff Page weren't much harder, but they did require some wrestling with the wordpress editor and how it has weird effects when you directly type code into it, changing or adding elements to some styles of code.

I've had another meeting with the charity and they're happy with how everything is looking, so now the next step is to get going! I'm going to bring the new theme and content into the live site in stages:

1. Edit several  of the larger pages (Mainly those holding information about the horses or those which don't rely on the new theme/plugins)
2. Take the website offline (Maintainence mode) and install the new plugins and theme.
3. Work through the rest of the pages, copying the code which I've already formatted into the live site.
4. Look through the site briefly, making sure nothing major has broken and that key infrmation areas are all functional.
5. Bring the site back online and go through full testing.

Back to work

I've just met with the clients recently. Most of the work is done now but I have a few more things to do before getting everything moved over from the test server to the live server. The clients have requested a few last minute features that I'm working my way around.

The tasks they have given me are to:

• Modify the WooCommerce plugin, backend and confirmation emails to include two new fields for Giftaid and newsletter subscription. 
• Work in a customisable popup system for staff page.
• Display the upcoming pony days on the appropriate page

The latter task has been easily accomplished by use of a plugin that adds shortcode functionality to the events calendar being used, the first two I'm aiming to do over the next few days. 

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Keeping on with the page conversions, the end of those is in sight.

Tweaks to the site have been going well, I'm feeling pretty happy with it in general now. I've got a piece of javascript working which lets the main nav-menu start partway down the screen but stick to the top when it gets to it. It's a fairly simple piece of code - just tracking the top of the screen value and applying or removing a css class to the nav-menu depending on that value - but it works well and I'm happy with it. The transition is nice and smooth on both desktop and larger tablet devices (It's disabled for smaller mobile devices).

Easter Break 2

As before pretty much. I've been Working my way through the website page by page; there are a hundred odd pages and pretty much all of them need to be converted. It's a boring task, but it's good to get it out of the way.

Aside from converting HTML pages  I've been continuing visual tweaks and looking into plugins for user management. The charity has the idea of creating private update pages for specific horses that people who support that horse will be given access to so I've created a template for those and am looking into plugins and other ways to regulate access.

Easter Break 1

Things are going as planned so far over the Easter Break. In my spare time from my placement I've been taking content from the HP website and getting it ready to be put into the new responsive theme. There's not a whole lot to talk about here; my work at the moment mostly consists of taking pages which have been created using poor technique (No use of headings, extensive use of tables for formatting, poorly sized images, etc) and formatting them into regular HTML. There are a lot of pages and it's fairly dreary work, but I'm getting through it.

Easter Break plans

Things are progressing nicely. The majority of the visual work on the theme has been done by this point and the overall frame of the website is working in both desktop and mobile views.

My plan for the coming month is to spend the Easter break working on preparing content from the main website to be brought over and doing small tweaks to the theme. My placement will stop me from giving the project my full attention but by the time I get back to Leeds I shouldn't be far from ready to meet with the charity reps and start putting the website to the live server.

Work In-Progress Evaluation

I'm fairly happy with the progress I have made to my project so far. It is true that I am somewhat behind where I had initially expected to be, but I also think that I had initially overestimated the amount of work that some bits would take. Specifically I originally thought that I would need to do more work with editing templates than it actually seems will be necessary. Client requirements for easy modification mean that much of the content structure will be built half between the page input and the actual templates, overall leading to a somewhat quicker production process.

There have been various things that have contributed to me being slightly behind where I would ideally like to be. At first I found it more difficult to switch to producing a child theme than I had expected, and I experienced several parts of the code breaking in unexpected ways that took me longer than I would have liked to fix, such as the enqueue-ing  of scripts and fonts. However I have eventually managed to work my way past these problems and get these troublesome elements working properly. There was also a small delay of about a week due to a mistake in communications that led to a meeting with the Hope Pastures staff being delayed.

Still, despite these setbacks overall things are going well. I’m happy with the responsive elements of the template that I have gotten working so far and am confident that I can continue to develop this template and get everything done on time. The amount of time each day I can spend on the project will be going down soon as I begin my work placement but I have accounted for this when I was initially planning my work and am confident it won’t be a major issue.

Under way

After a fair delay due to the meeting, things are finally moving along now. I've met with the HP staff again and reaffirmed my plans with them, so now it's on to actually building things. At the request of the staff over the next week I'm going to be looking in depth at specific plugins to use with the site. This will include looking at the graphics and features for the Calendar plugin, making sure that the donation plugin can accept all the information needed for Giftaid and making sure that all the plugins run smoothly.

Delay

There has been a fair delay in my work due to an error in communications with the charity I've been working with. While trying to organise a meeting to finalise some details so that production could start, one part of a three way email replied to the other recipient, but not me. Nobody noticed this error for a while and it caused significant delay in the meeting.

Unfortunately until the meeting has gotten underway, I am significantly limited in what progress I can make. Fortunately the meeting has been scheduled for next Tuesday and work should resume shortly. It's an annoying setback, but one from which I can recover with a little extra work.

Prototype critical analysis

Looking back at my prototype, I'm happy overall with what I've acheived. The goal for this prototype was always primarily to establish a good base of knowledge with how wordpress themes work and the sort of work that goes into creating them. Creating this prototype theme has given me experience of making small modifications to all the different bits that I might be working with in the actual project, and most importantly has informed me about the general syntax and structure of a wordpress theme.

As far as the choice to use wordpress for the theme in general, I'm still feelign very confident in that choice. While it isn't the perfect platform to use and the modification of individual content on an individual page is slightly convulted, the positives of using wordpress for this project outweigh the negatives.

I feel that it's important to link this project to the sort of work I will be doing when graduating, and that involves looking at how the customer will interact with the website.Creating a website from scratch wound arguably be much easier for me when it comes to creating the more complicated customised features, but the tradeoff would be either having to create a complex backend system myself or the customer not being able to easily edit and work with the website. Wordpress provides a very easy to customise backend, regular security updates and a well established payment system; all of which the customers have experience using. In this case, the little bit of extra work learning how to change the more complicated visual elements is definitely worth it.

In the end, the only thing I think I would change about the prototype if I had the chance is the general direction. In the prototype I created a customised theme from scratch using the very basic underscores theme, whereas it might have been more useful to instead create a child theme over a more full-featured theme, as I am likely to do for the actual product. There are good and bad points to this. The development process for it was more complex and so introduced me to more wordpress technical concepts than I would have experienced going down an alternate route, which is an obvious positive, but it has left a few specific gaps in my knowledge. I have been working to fill these gaps though and the differences seem superficial at best; more a case of understanding a slightly different file structure than actually knowing any more specific code. In the end while I might have done some bits slightly differently, I'm happy with what I have done and feel confident I have gained the knowledge I need to progress with the project.

Audience Research

One of the first pieces of research I did that concerned my audience wasn’t directly related to

them, but to other services that were popular with them. Early in the project I looked at a selection of websites belonging to competing charities that also dealt with animal welfares; splitting my research between a general look at animal charities nationwide and then a more focused look at charities that worked with equines and/or were based around Leeds/West Yorkshire.

The information that I gathered during this phase consisted of me visiting the websites and looking for common features among them and things that I thought worked well of badly on each website, as well as role-playing myself as a user of the website attempting to donate money, find out about events or research the charity and their cause. As well as being used in my Pitch document, it was this research which guided my initial design work for the project during the initial sketching stages and when discussing the project with the Hope Pastures staff.

Later on in the year, over Christmas, I made and distributed a small survey to family, friends, friends of family and workmates. This survey was aimed at identifying the usage habits and preferences of those people who regularly used the websites of charities that they donated to. The survey primarily asked about the sort of features that were regularly used on charity websites which the participants liked and felt affected their donation habits.

The text of the survey is below. It received around 20 responses when I was distributing it.

What's your gender?

*Male

*Female

*Prefer not to say

How old are you?

*21 and Under

*22 to 34

*35 to 44

*45 to 54

*55 to 64

*65 and Over

*Prefer not to say

How often do you donate to charities?

How much do you typically donate?

Do you often access the website of the charities you donate to?

*Yes

*No

Do elements on the website (Such as news, stories or other content) typically affect your decision to donate?

*Yes

*No

If Yes, please expand.

Describe one thing that you think many charity websites you have visited do wrong. Feel free to give specific examples.

Describe one thing that you think many charity websites you have visited do right. Feel free to give specific examples.

Please describe what your ideal experience would be when visiting a charity website.

Thank you for taking the time to fill in this survey.

In general, the results for the survey were fairly inconclusive, with many questions failing to show strong trends. It did typically emerge that those above the age of 30 tended to give more and in larger amounts, a statistic which is also supported by a survey performed by Professor Sarah Smith on behalf of the Charities Aid Foundation and reported by The Guardian Datablog. (Smith, 2012)(Sedghi, 2012)

Smith’s report showed that in a study involving data from 1980 to 2010 those around the upper age groups typically tended to be most likely to donate. The Under 30’s bracket came last in all four date spans and the 30 – 44 and 60 – 74 ranges came twice each, with the elder bracket being the highest in recent years. The Guardian article summarised the information nicely into two tables:

Percentage of households giving – by age group Click heading to sort table. Download this data
Ageband	1980	1990	2000	2010
Source: Mind the Gap by CAF and Bristol University
<30	23.2	17.2	15.2	15.6
30-44	33.7	28.8	27.6	24.8
45-59	39.1	34	29.9	26.5
60-74	30.7	29.9	32.1	32.7
75+	27.4	27.8	30	31.1

Average weekly giving among the total population and donor population, £ Click heading to sort table. Download this data
Year	Donor population	Donor population, smoothed	Total population	Total population smoothed
Source: Mind the Gap by CAF and Bristol University
1978	3.65	3.35	1.17	1.09
1979	4.09	3.54	1.27	1.14
1980	3.58	3.81	1.16	1.21
1981	4.01	4.14	1.31	1.30
1982	3.93	4.50	1.23	1.40
1983	4.66	4.86	1.39	1.49
1984	4.09	5.21	1.28	1.58
1985	5.27	5.54	1.60	1.67
1986	6.09	5.86	1.87	1.76
1987	6.76	6.16	2.05	1.84
1988	7.99	6.45	2.31	1.92
1989	7.18	6.75	2.08	2.00
1990	7.44	7.05	2.12	2.08
1991	7.42	7.34	2.13	2.15
1992	7.11	7.62	2.05	2.22
1993	8.57	7.86	2.50	2.28
1994	7.96	8.07	2.46	2.33
1995	8.44	8.25	2.62	2.37
1996	7.57	8.40	2.19	2.41
1997	8.19	8.54	2.48	2.45
1998	8.60	8.67	2.28	2.48
1999	10.12	8.80	2.54	2.52
2000	11.68	8.93	3.28	2.55
2001	8.25	9.05	2.25	2.57
2002	7.74	9.16	2.34	2.59
2003	8.49	9.26	2.50	2.61
2004	10.68	9.33	3.07	2.62
2005	8.79	9.39	2.49	2.63
2006	8.84	9.43	2.55	2.64
2007	10.84	9.46	3.19	2.64
2008	10.16	9.50	2.75	2.64
2009	8.99	9.57	2.37	2.63
2010	9.17	9.65	2.47	2.61

(Sedghi, 2012)

However while the very elderly seem to be the biggest donators they are also, in my survey at least, the least likely to use the website at all. As such from my research I decided that my primary targets should be those between 20 and 40; attempting to convince the upper end of the low-donating age group while also focusing on the highest donating group that regularly used the websites.

My survey also found that out of those who did use the websites, a large number of them tended to describe themselves as very affected by the sort of content that the websites displayed and said they would usually donate more if they viewed an emotive story  or picture on the website while they were visiting. These sort of things were particularly commonly reported with animal welfare charities, which is especially relevant in my case.

As well as my own survey, I have looked at various studies, surveys and reports online while looking at ideas and designs. An article by the Charities Aid Foundation in 2012 talks about the importance of getting younger people involved with giving to charities, with Chief Executive John Low making a point that I agree with that:

The generosity of Britain’s older generation continues to be remarkable – and many charities today depend heavily on their support.

“The worrying fact is that people from Generation X and Generation Y are simply not giving to the same extent.

“We fear that charities will face a damaging donation deficit when people of the older generations pass away. That would severely hit the funding of charities, and their ability to deliver vital services on which so many people rely. This must be addressed now if charities are to survive and thrive.

“We need clear steps to be taken in order to build up the culture of giving among younger people, to ensure that Britain continues to support the causes we all care about in the decades to come.”

(John Low, in Charity Aid Foundation 2012)

Another report that I looked at came from Eduserv and focused specifically on techniques for attracting donations to charity websites. This report was both an interesting and an informative read, touching upon several important points that I have kept in mind while thinking about my designs and plans. One concept that I fully agree with is the concept of “Donation Friction”, referring to the speed and ease with which a user can access the website resources and make a donation. The report points out several good points about this:            

Every second of delay can lose donors, so page speed should remain a key focus (either through development fixes or changes to back end infrastructure or content management restructuring).

And

Accessibility, while not a priority for many charities, should be put back on the agenda because of its impact on search and other important performance factors.(eduserv, 2014)

Which I think are both very important points to consider when I am designing the website. The concept of making sure that the user can do what they want to do with as little trouble as possible is far from unfamiliar with web design but it feels especially relevant for an act like donating. With there typically being no physical reward for the act – as opposed to a user buying something from a website – it feels much easier to potentially lose the attention of the user with a long and clunky process.

The article makes a wide range of good points beyond this, but aside from the particularly relevant point about donation friction, one point that I thought particularly important to keep in mind when developing my ideas and content was just how important making the website accessible to all sorts of users was. The article points out that not only does accessibility affect users directly but it can also affect how prominently the website appears in search listings.

Accessibility may feel like a tick in the box but it’s something all charities could look at from a performance perspective too. The simple fact is search engines prefer W3C sites. (Laila Takeh, quoted in eduserv, 2014)

Bibliography:

(Note, online referenced are dated from most recent access)

Charities Aid Foundation. 2012. Charities Face generation time-bomb, as younger people lose the habit of giving – report.  [Online]. [Accessed on 21^st January 2015]. Available from: https://www.cafonline.org/media-office/press-releases/2012/2109-mind-the-gap.aspx

Eduserv.  2014. Optimising charity websites for donations.  [Online]. [Accessed on November 22^nd January 2015]. Available from: http://eduserv.org.uk/insight/reports/Optimising-charity-websites-for-donations

Sedghi, A. 2012. Charitable giving – how does it differ by age?. The Guardian – Datablog. [Online]. 25 September. [Accessed 22^nd January 2015]. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/sep/25/charitable-giving-generation-gap-age

Smith, S. 2012. Mind the Gap. [Online]. Charities Aid Foundation. [Accessed on 21^st January 2015]. Available from: https://www.cafonline.org/pdf/1190H_PartyConf_MindTheGap.pdf