Website changes

If you’ve visited the website recently you may have noticed a few changes. Our developers made a release of a new version of the site on 14th November that went fairly smoothly – we all expect a few problems when putting new software live, don’t we?

There are a few minor cosmetic changes as we move towards making the site compliant with the accessibility guidelines defined by the W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/#Conformance). We know that we’ve still got a lot of work to do in this area but it is something we’re looking at and eventually we’d like to bring the site up to Conformance Level “Double-A”.

A number of changes have also been designed to help our administrator. Nigel is the person who keeps everything running smoothly by making sure that opportunities get published on the website and by dealing with queries from charities and volunteers. We hope that these changes will make it easier for him to help you.

But there are also some changes to the volunteer screens!
Most importantly, you can now see more information up front about the charity or community group that has requested help. When you do a search for work packages three new pieces of information are displayed in the table of results:

• Postcode – this shows the first part of the charity’s postcode, e.g. “EC1A”
• Region Detail – this is part of the charity’s address. It may be a town such as “Peterborough” or a district such as “Tower Hamlets”.
• Charity Types – one or more areas in which the charity works.

The first two are intended to help you decide if the charity is local to you before contacting them. We’re aware that some of our regions are quite large and you probably don’t want to travel from one end to another. However, remember that the Region Detail field is free text and sometimes it may even be left blank.

The Charity Type field is based on information that charities may choose to supply when they register. They may select as many options as they wish from the list we supply. We know that many of you like to work with certain types of charities and we hope that this information will help you decide. But we only started collecting this information in May so it isn’t yet available for many of the work packages.

You can also sort on any of these fields if it makes it easier to find the work package you’re interested in.
Talking of sorting we’ve changed the default sort order on this screen. If you’re a regular visitor to the site you probably only want to see the new work packages that have been published since you last looked.  So we changed it so that the search results are automatically sorted with the most recent ones at the top of the list.

The final change that you may spot is on the “Requests for work packages” screen. We thought it was a bit tedious to have to click the “Search” button just to see the list of the work packages you’ve requested. So we’ve made that the default view. If you want to refine the list you can specify search criteria.

We hope that these changes will make it easier for you to volunteer with iT4Communities. Please let us know what you think. As ever, we’d love to have your comments at info@iT4Communities.org.uk