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Boys & Girls Club Wins First #GiveBack Website From Clear Idea

Clear Idea is happy to announce the Boys & Girls Club of Manatee County as the winner of our first Give Back Campaign.

The voting for our first Give Back campaign was incredibly close, but at the end of the day, our team felt that the Boys & Girls Club of Manatee County would not only benefit greatly from a new website, but would also be able to effectively leverage that website as a tool for greater good throughout the community.

Serving more than 4,000 kids and operating a number of club locations, the Boys & Girls Club will primarily benefit from a brand new, responsive web design, which will eliminate the need for them to continue managing two different websites. One for the web, and a secondary mobile website.

Tech note: Having a seperate mobile websites was very common years ago when the mobile web was in its infancy, but now the two website system is outdated and inneficient. Not to mention it can negatively affect your overall online performance. Learn more about the importance of responsive web design. 

Additionally, the Boys & Girls Club has a large real world audience, who will immediately benefit from the ability to explore all of the information, services and events that they have to offer.

“We feel confident that our investment in the Boys & Girls Club website will pay off exponentially for the organization as a whole, but by no means, does that mean this was an easy decision.” Said Teddy Matheu, CEO of Clear Idea Labs.

The stories submitted by each of the nonprofits were extremely compelling. And we wish we could have helped each and every one of the applicants, but in the end, there could only be one winner.

The good news is that we plan on doing it all over again in 6 months, and we might even talk a few other digital agencies into joining us in giving back to the nonprofit community.

Who knows, maybe we’ll start a trend!

But wait… That’s not all!

In an unexpected turn of events, we have also decided to create an unofficial runner-up prize.

As we learned from their heart-felt submission, the webmaster over at Rob’s Rescue Foundation passed away, leaving them locked out of their website and unable to update it, or collect online donations. It didn’t take us long to decide as a team that we wanted to help them get ther website back on track, regardless of the final vote.

It won’t be a comprehensive web overhaul like our grand prize, but we wanted to give them a fresh start online, and provide them with the chance to grow their small yet effective organization.

I don’t think we’ll make a habit of picking two winners for each Give Back campaign, but this time around, we couldn’t help ourselves.

Thanks for following us on this journey… Please share The #GiveBack Campaign with a nonprofit who couldbenefit from an online boost! Thanks for sharing the love.

Fill out the short form below for notifications about future Give Back campaigns.

 

 

Give Back Voting Too Close to Count – Tiebreaker Scheduled

too-close-to-count

We were supposed to announce the winner of our Give Back campaign this afternoon, but the truth is that the voting was too close for our internal team to feel comfortable making a final decision without more information about each of the nonprofits.

As a team, we have decided to push back the formal announcement of our GiveBack campaign, and have instead scheduled time to meet one-on-one with each the top 3 vote getters. During that meeting we will gather a bit more information about the impact the new website will have, not only on their organization, but on the community as a whole.

Because of this delay, we will now plan on announcing the Give Back campaign winner Friday October 9th.

The 3 finalists are listed below, in no particular order.

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WordCamp Tampa 2015

Clear Idea To Donate A New Website To A Local Nonprofit Every 6 Months


SARASOTA, FL – July 21, 2015 – Clear Idea Labs, a Sarasota based software development firm, unveiled their #GiveBack campaign today, in support of their local community.

As part of the campaign, Clear Idea will accept submissions, from local nonprofits who need a new website or are looking to update their online brand image. 

“There are hundreds of nonprofits in Manatee and Sarasota counties, and many of them have little to no web presence. We want to fix that.” Said Teddy Matheu, CEO of Clear Idea.”The #GiveBack campaign is something we came up with while thinking of ways to use our development talent to best serve the community.” 

The goal of the #GiveBack campaign is to help local non-profits build online exposure, engage their online audience, and increase donations by delivering a custom website that is mobile friendly and easy to use. 

“We are going to re-build the website from the ground up.” said Lee Jones, CTO of Clear Idea. “This won’t be a cookie cutter website. We will work one-on-one with the selected nonprofit as if they were our client, and build them a killer website that drives results.”

In addition to a new website, Clear Idea will include hosting, website management and ongoing maintenance for one year after the website is delivered to the non-profit.  

“There are so many awesome non-profits in the area, that the hardest part is going to be picking a winner.” Said Raymmar Tirado, Director of Products at Clear Idea. “That’s why we plan on repeating the process every six months. We’re even hoping to inspire other technology companies to make the same commitment.” 

You can learn more about the #GiveBack campaign at https://clearidea.us/give-back

Clear Idea is a Sarasota based software development firm specializing in web and mobile application development. Learn more at https://clearidea.us

Media contact:

Raymmar Tirado
Director of Products
941-362-1799 ext 170
2627 Mall Drive
Sarasota, Fl 34231
raymmar@clearidea.us

6 Steps To Creating Your Ideal Product Feature Set

Creating an Ideal Product Feature Set

1 Create a Budget

Creating a budget doesn’t have to be a hugely complicated thing. To a degree, you should already know how much money you have access to, which will need to be divided between marketing, operations and development.

In this context, we are dealing strictly with the development budget.

2 List Features

We’ve seen it many many times in the past. People come to us with and extensive, ever increasing, list of features for their big idea, believing that they know exactly what their users want. We build the product. Clients then often find out that their users ignore a large percentage of those “must have” features that ate up a significant portion of their development budget, and are now dead in the water.

When it comes to a new product, you have to start somewhere. So go ahead and make the list of features for the product that is in your head. The trick here it is to condition yourself to avoid the idea that you know exactly what features your users want. You need to understand that your feature set is merely a hypothesis that needs to be proven. We’ll get to that a little bit.

Once you are done with your feature set, it should be a relatively simple exercise to create your user stories.

3 Create a Storyboard

Based on the user stories collected above, we should now be able to wire frame out all of our views and connect them in a meaningful fashion in the story board. We don’t need to go crazy with graphic design here. We just need enough user interface to get the point across for the users

4 Do Client Interviews

The point of a focus group is to guide a group of people who represent your demographic through different scenarios and the use of your product. You are allowing them to interact with it in a somewhat meaningful way and will then collect their opinions through the use of structured surveys. The results of these surveys should be invaluable in compiling the final feature set.

5 Get Estimates

You should now have the resulting final feature set based on your focus group results. Based on this list, you are now ready to get some estimates. What you need is an estimate per feature, so that after you have prioritized them you’ll be able to make the determination as to which ones are developed based on the highest level priorities that fit within your budget.

6 Compile Your Final Feature Set

This venn diagram provides a fairly accurate view of the resulting decision. It’s the intersection of what you think the customer wants, what the customer actually wants and what you can afford to build based on the estimates you gather.

Featureset Venn Diagram