Update: Alas, Rubifruit was too popular and I could not afford to keep her running. Better luck next time!
I purchased a commercial banner exchange script, Easy Banner Pro, but getting it from it’s bland, table-based default to my shiny, CSS-based vision was quite a chore. I had three goals to fulfill with the new design, and they were:
- Get them to sign up
- Get them to upload banners
- Get them to put the exchange code on their site
It looks easy, but the default site didn’t make it absolutely simple to do. Things were a little confusing. Like, when you logged in, you had to click around a bit before you could upload a banner. I had to make sure that people would sign up, upload a banner, and get their exchange code in as few clicks as possible. I had to make it obvious, easy, and all the while remind the user how much it would benefit them to follow through, because it’s so easy to sign up for something, then just forget about it.
Implementing the new design required lots of gutting and customizing. I started by scraping the user-side and public pages free of their table confines. Some back-and-forthing with the very helpful script creators resulted in the pleasant addition of several powerful and helpful features to both the front-end and the user side, one of which was the list of newly added banners. Many people didn’t want to join without seeing who else was joining, and I was greatly pleased that the script creators were so helpful with that.
To encourage users to upload more banners, I made sure that all sizes were represented with upload links as soon as they logged in and that exchange codes were provided wherever users would instinctively look for them.
While the site is fairly stable, there are still some extra things I want to do to make it even more streamlined. I have new code that will route first-time users directly to a banner upload page as soon as they log in, great for getting new participants to take action and keep moving forward.
The site has been a success and hundreds of banners now fly between the fabulous participants, helping to introduce fans to new comics, blogs, podcasts and more. Rubifruit.com itself is slated for development as pro-girl webcomics host sometime in 2009.