Staff Blog: Behind Our Latest Redesign

As our organization shifts gears from facilitating volunteering and fundraising to creating content, we decided it was due time our site reflected that transition. Over time we have gained a greater breadth of knowledge about the social good community within Philadelphia. This has informed our shift in direction so that we can be more representative of the community’s needs.

Moving forward, our focus will be on telling the stories that need to be shared and bringing people together to impact change.

I’m here to give you a quick rundown of the updated site’s functionality.

Homepage

Starting at the top right of the new homepage you’ll see where you can log in and sign up for the site, or search for a specific term, story, or organization. This makes it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.

After you search, you will be brought to a results page that displays both stories and now organizations that match your keywords.

If you are the administrator of an organization listed on our site you can still access that through My Generocity just as you always have. The link has moved and is now located at the top right of the site once you’re logged in.

If you haven’t posted your organization yet and wish to, you just need to go to the Get Started page which is located under Organizations in the main navigation. Once there click on the Create an account button.

Below the header is our navigation bar, which has also undergone a few changes to help exemplify our focus.

The Home link has been replaced with a home icon, Stories has become Read, and we’ve removed Events, Fundraisers, Volunteer, Jobs, and Grants. We will still be posting events, job, and grants to our site, but they will be posted just like any other story in our main news feed.

The volunteer functionality isn’t going away either. It will  be located in the drop-down selection under Organizations. We’ve also added in a link for Programs & Partnerships that will display information and details about our community outreach initiatives.

The body of the website has gone through the most dramatic changes, mainly to dedicate more space to our content and different ways to search through it.

Stories
Our most recently posted stories will display first within the large image slider on the left. As new stories are posted they will get pushed into the feed with the rest of the stories running down the right side of the page.

Running down the left side, below the image slider, is our ‘Featured Topics,’ ‘’Poll,’ ‘Popular Stories,’ and ‘Newslinks’ sections. Our ‘Trending Topics’ listed on the bottom above the footer.

• Featured Topics: what our current focus is centered around within the social good ecosystem. This will change over time as new topics and trends emerge.
• Poll: A continually updated place for our readers to give us their feedback.
• Popular Stories: what readers are clicking and reading the most.
• Newslinks: a list of our most recently posted stories on other sites that we think would be valuable to our community.
• Trending Topics: topics that are currently most popular among our readers.

We hope you’ll keep coming back to stay up-to-date on our content and participate in our programs and partnerships. If you have any questions or comments regarding our redesign, don’t hesitate to send me an email at wyatt@generocity.org or post a comment below.