I browse to http://showcase.agileventures.org.

I like the colour scheme - it feels like an evolution of the main AV scheme - more modern and not as harsh on the eyeballs. I'd like to see this across the entire site.

The front page doesn't tell me much to be honest - I have to move on to find anything useful, so maybe that initial page doesn't serve any purpose? It's just some text and a button...

This is the showcase site for AV - so why isn't the showcase front and centre? I have an initial page that tells me nothing really, it "wants" me to click on the big "Tell Me More" button which leads on to a page about why I should choose AV - again, no showcase!

Anyway, I click on the button and I like the vertical carousel effect to bring the content into view.
This content is better on the main site - I've already been on agileventures.org and read about who you are and what you are doing, so I am coming here to see examples of your work - I don't really need to be told who you are and what you do again.

Still looking for that showcase but now I am confused.
I clicked on "Tell Me More", so in my mind I am in "button clicking mode" so I expect there to be another button to click or other such navigation in the page, but there isn't.

I can see that the menu has "Why Us" highlighted - is this the same place I navigated to? It isn't what I clicked...
It is a bit jarring to move from "in page" navigation to using the menu system - I'd rather use one or the other, and have the highlighted menu item match whatever the button was I clicked if indeed we need both buttons and menu items.

I want to go back to the front page incase I missed a button there so I click the "back" button in the browser - oops, I am taken to the previous site I was on, not the previous page I was on in this site - not a great user experience. It is possible to make SPA's work with the back button - as a user I don't know or care that it's an SPA, so I reasonably expect the back button to take me to where I was just a minute ago...

Ok now I know I need to use the menus to go to any page except "Why Us", where I have an optional big button to click.
I click on the various options and notice I get the nice carousel effect for all of them except "blog" which jars because the screen flashes a bit - this is a nav to a completely new page, not an SPA nav - and indeed I can see the URL has changed from http://showcase.agileventures.org to http://blog.agileventures.org/#blog. Why the double-blog? blog. and #blog - seems a bit redundant.

I now click on the "Contact" link from the blog page and I am taken to http://showcase.agileventures.org/#contact. If I now click on any other link (except blog) this remains the same - so I click on "Why Us" and the link still says "http://showcase.agileventures.org/#contact" even though the nav actually happens. (Incidentally, the nav from the blog page to "Why Us" leads to http://showcase.agileventures.org/#services - I'd prefer some consistency here in the name of the page, menu item and nav link).

I appreciate that "normal" users might not notice or care that the URL does not change, but you are pitching to devs to join you to work on projects as well as to non profits looking to have their visions realised - devs will notice things like URL's not changing and that you have switched from SPA to non-SPA

noticed this in some blogs

Currently, we display the author name at the end of the blog. It would be better if we could display it right below the blog title. See here.

Also, we should consider making the title a link pointing to the author's AV profile or personal or github profile.

so we look good in tabs

replace ghost on heroku with middleman blog

OR

investigate dyno sharing options?

https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2016/5/18/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_flexible_dyno_hours#flexible-free-dyno-hours

Could get VAHC, CraftAcademy logos in here maybe?

should remove this as it points to old site:

http://showcase.agileventures.org

I'm not sure that this page is necessary in the "Showcase" site - this content is more appropriate in the main site I'd have thought - I would expect the showcase site to be all about showcasing the work.

I'm not sure who the target audience is for this page but assuming it is the non-profits themselves, in the "much lower cost" section you talk about "open API's" and "free modules". As a non-profit, non-technical person, I have no idea what these terms mean.
Why do I care? I care it is no/low cost, I understand about licence fees and overheads and staff costs - but this bit is just jargon.

I wonder if you actually need two pages - Why Us for non-profits and Why Us for developers?
Look at this site: http://aurelia.io/docs.html#/aurelia/framework/latest/doc/article/what-is-aurelia
In the top left you choose what sort of person you are and the content is tailored towards that audience - perhaps you need to consider that sort of approach since AV needs to attract both non-profits and developers - two wildly different audiences.

Regarding your contact link on this page:

TO DISCUSS YOUR SOFTWARE PROJECT NEEDS, EMAIL [email protected]

I think someone already mentioned in chat that this is a bit "shouty". It is also clearly not aimed at developers who might want to contact you to get involved with AV, so what email address do they use?

Beyond that, the word "sales" equates in my mind to "cost" which is something a non-profit wants to minimise. Perhaps a more "neutral" address is required which does not imply cost - many non-profits will have little or no cash to splash on websites so the cost associated words might scare them off.

could replace jstv usage with moment usage.

Should probably increase test coverage in advance of refactoring ...

timeline text and images (and dates) are maybe a bit wonky ...

As with other pages, this is not about the showcase and does not belong as part of the showcase site.

This is largely a history of how AV was born, and there's nothing wrong with that - but this is also a place you might talk about us now - ie what you do, what you offer - the sort of content in fact that you have on other pages that are not "about us".
Or perhaps you need an "about us" page with all the details on what AV is about and what it does and a "how we started" or some such page.

The content talks about the "OSRA project" and "LocalSupport" and other things, but why aren't these links either to those sites themselves or in the two cases above, to the showcase for those sites?

The only link you have is to Craft Academy, which is not even part of AV itself, just someone you collaborate with. You mention the AV premium services but don't link to them either.

Missed opportunities - the web is good at linking to other pages and sites - you should use it!

should get that fixed

or do we even need a team tagline?

add site links? contact details?

use either travis or semaphore or codeship to automate deploys

at least to test that we don't get 404s

could include:

• adjusting the left/center allign of contact from small to large screen size
• putting back in the icons
• adjusting the #columns
• redesigning further

I click on the "Contact" menu item because I want to contact you.
This is what I see:

A couple of massive texts boxes so I can subscribe for updates!
I don't want to do that - I want to contact you.
If I look carefully, I can see an email address (which isn't even a hyperlink) at the bottom of the page.
On a "Contact" page, I would expect the contact-y bit to be front and centre.
Also the image I pasted is from a full screen retina MacBook Pro screen, but half of the contact info is cut off at the bottom of the screen - I shouldn't have to scroll to see the very information I came to this page for.

The stuff at the bottom of the page - apart from the contact info, which is what I want, the other info is a bit random almost - who we are and what we do - why is this on the "Contact" page and not, say the "about" page? Or possibly at the bottom of every page?

You could make this whole thing smaller (it uses a lot of vertical space, doesn't take great advantage of horizontal space:

and have it as a footer to every page on the site - certainly in a desktop browser.

Also needs a bit of work reactive website-wise:
Resizing it on my mac, I go from this:

to this (a very slightly narrower window):

To this: (again just making it narrower):

If I scroll the page a bit to bring the content into view then I have this:

text boxes are right to the edge of the screen, which doesn't look great. Keep on narrowing the window and I get this:

so a bit more work needed on

• more links (projects) in about section
• hyperlink the contact email
• break the contact footer etc into it's own section with it's own navigation
• have a separate subscribe thing in the nav bar to navigate to subscribe ...
• hmm, could change away from the "+" - wonder what icon might be better ...?
• create http://nonprofits.agileventures.org/
• middleman blog

make work or replace

need compiled style from middleman site

current template is rather unDRY - use power of middleman to DRY out

the template we pulled in uses less, which needs node, and middleman is sass (based on ruby), so we should probably convert:

https://github.com/ekryski/less2sass

The process will likely be instructive ...

need images and blurb for all

from @yggie

had a quick look at the showcase, I noticed the text

TO DISCUSS YOUR SOFTWARE PROJECT NEEDS, EMAIL [email protected]
appears twice in bold and shouty case… it is really noticeable and not too far apart from each other, perhaps we could make these CTAs a little smaller and have another one at the bottom together with the subscribe button which can be as big as necessary 😄

also a minor UI issue, the highlight color and the link color match almost exactly, to the point where the text is completely obscured

This is a typical showcase screen:

It's not very showcase-y I'm afraid. There is a huge amount of whitespace at the top of the page with the giant X, as I have mentioned in the navigation story: #37

There is very little text explaining what this site is or why I should be excited about it - either as a developer or as a non-profit looking for similar functionality.
Also I have to scroll the page to see all the content in some cases - which shouldn't be necessary when there is so little of it! But more content please rather than less to make the page fit!

The use of colour is sparing but effective on the site itself, but on these showcase pages it has all but disappeared and it doesn't feel very...vibrant or exciting - sorry I can't provide more helpful descriptions.
There's no "wow" factor, they don't leap out at me.
In the example I pasted in from Snow Angels, is that really the most exciting screenshot of the app?

Consistency: The images I see on the showcase list don't appear on the showcase page for that site.
For example this:

Which is a nice image of a vibrant looking website. When I click on it, I get this:

and at first I don't know if I've clicked into the right link or not - I don't see that initial image again there is none of the colour or anything else about the image I clicked to suggest that I am on a related page.
Consider repeating the image the person clicked on, say top left-ish, so you know you are on the right page.
In this specific instance, consider making OSRA more prominent - as part of the title.

How about links to the actual sites themselves? Even better than just seeing a static screenshot is being able to jump to the site to try it out - obviously not possible in a back office only site but certainly possible for the majority of AV projects.
You provide a link to the source code, which is nice for developers, but bugger all use for anyone else!
If the showcase is primarily to attract non-profits then have links relevant to them.

Dog-fooding - why isn't the main AV site listed here? It was, after all, created by the AV community - don't you want to show that your devs are good enough to work on your own site as well as the sites of non-profits? agileventures.org is at least one of the more colourful sites you have so even a static image of that stands out more than some of the admin back ends.

Finally, since mobile is where it's at these days, perhaps some of the mobile apps should be higher up the list of case studies?

add?

something to look into ...

Since the font-size of .footer .contact-list div is 1.5em and we have applied padding-left of 20% to it, the email link flows out of the viewport.

http://nonprofits.agileventures.org/#contact

Suggested fix:

Reduce the font-size of .footer .contact-list to 1.2em. To stay consistent, we should also reduce the font-size of .footer .list to 1.2em

need pagination or something ...

might be useful ...

http://kb.mailchimp.com/lists/signup-forms/add-a-signup-form-to-your-website

Charles happy to receive phone calls apparently

2.3?

at the moment longer titles and taglines can bleed out at certain resolutions since we are avoiding line wrapping in order to avoid the boxes moving.

Might need change of media sizes ...

Charles keen to have copy reflect this below:

Get Free Guide

10 ways software solutions can enable Charities and Non-Profits to be more effective and more efficient. pdf
Occasional How-to software articles 

  your first name ………………….
  your last name ………………….
  your email ………………….

               Get Free Guide

he also likes the CA use of "keep me posted" as the button text

for consistency with the navigation?

this would make different parts of the site bookmarkable

would also be good to have section ids match the nav names if we do this

fill in or remove?

On the Showcase page when I hover over a site, the image switches to a big plus:

This sort of image usually means I am adding something - e.g. in c9.io it would mean "adding a workspace" - so what am I adding here?

When I click on a showcase site, the whole page is replaced - it seems a bit like a pop-up because I have a massive (why so big??) X in the corner but it takes up the whole screen - popups don't normally do that - and indeed it didn't "pop up", it faded in.
So is it a popup or a new page I have navigated to?

If I scroll down the page I also see a "Close Project" button - what does this do? Does it literally close the project? That's not what I want to do! Or does it just close the popup? The text is confusing as to the function of the button.

Also, I did have to scroll to see that button on some pages - this is what I see on a full screen retina Macbook Pro:

There is a huge amount of whitespace at the top, for the "title bar" I guess containing that giant X (And nothing else!) so I have to scroll to get the button which performs exactly the same function as the big X - do we need it? And if we do need it, should I have to scroll to see it? Again, is if this is a popup then the answer should be "No".

If you want to keep the giant X then maybe put the AV logo in the top left so at least you haven't lost the site branding?

Also, it's not very reactive/mobile friendly - when I reduce it to it's smallest I get this:

the massive X is still just as big as when on a fullscreen browser and the only thing that changes size is the screenshot of the site - the text stays exactly the same size as it always was.

Same behavior on physical ipad mini in landscape mode.

could do with a button in the "why AV" section to lead people on to the case studies ...

to get endowments!

to be a real "startup" charity

and maybe add our logo? and change to our font?

Would be good that if the number changes, or that we want the call to action to be an email then we could move that messaging to the data component for ease of changing

hmm ...

• Delete ! after my phone number. This looks strange
• Add “for use by you”, after: All case studies available as platform templates.
• On the Case Studies page, add the phone number sentence at the bottom of this page: TO DISCUSS YOUR SOFTWARE PROJECT NEEDS, CALL NOW 07803 544689
• Case Studies – should we add website addresses for the projects? --> "can't show most projects as they are back end systems"
• Snow Angels: I would change the heading to: Mobile Based Volunteer Management
• Met Plus: I would change to Michigan Employment & Training Plus – MET/PLUS [note I have used / but this is supposed to be a vertical line]
• I would change Job Board to: Web platform for Job Seekers and Employers
• OSRA Office Admin Support. I would change this to OSRA Orphan Sponsorship & Relief Association. Office Admin System for linking Orphans to Sponsors
• Pages flow well one to another, except there is no link to the Blog Page. At the bottom of the WebPage, under What We Do, I wonder if we could have a link to our Blog, with one of your white on Orange click boxes, with the text: SEE MORE ABOUT WHAT WE DO ON OUR BLOG
• On the Blog, can you have a share by Email, or is this too complex?
• Also on the Blog, will there be an index to the Blog articles? --> "the current link is to the index"
• I need to give you text for a new blog. Can I assume the blogs will be in date order, latest first? --> "presumably yes"
• Using the Contact page, I signed up, got the confirm email, and all worked well – Brilliant!. But, go to website took me to the other AV website, not this one, so can you sort that?