Shaping the Page
Director-ee Gets Some Love
Since Director-ee was launched earlier this year, Ryan Battles and I have been keeping a list of features and improvements we’ve been wanting to add to the site. But client work has kept us too busy to give Director-ee the attention it deserves. So we finally decided to pull an all-nighter, locking ourselves in the office, turning off email, chat, etc., and focusing uninterrupted on Director-ee. As a result we were able to knock out a few of the items on our list, and I’m excited to tell you about some of those updates here.
Skills Listing
On each member’s public profile page we now display a list of the member’s top five skills they specialize in. This listing is in the profile sidebar. We realize that everyone on Director-ee does more than just EE development, and flaunting your areas of expertise can be helpful when trying to pair up with another developer or potential client. So be sure to add your skills within your Profile Form.
The Skills Matrix
Besides listing members’ skills on the public profile pages, we wanted to make it easier to globally search for other members based on a desired skill set. So we’ve added The Skills Matrix to help do just that. The matrix lists all of the individual skills represented on Director-ee. Choose the combination of skills you’re looking for and see who fits the bill!
Availability
Sticking with the theme of helping members find the right person to partner up with, we’ve added an availability status for each member. Your status will appear as an icon on your white mini-profile badge, and as a line-item on your public profile page. Hopefully this will help filter out those who are available to help with tight deadlines, vs. those members who would be a good fit for a project that’s further down the road. Again, your availability can be set within your Profile Form.
Company Name & URL
Our main focus with Director-ee has always been the individual people that make up the EE community, as opposed to promoting the companies we all work for. That being said, we did feel there was a missing element on the public profile pages for people who would like to at least mention their companies. We’ve noticed that some members have even put in their company names in place of their personal names, which is fine. But we thought giving people a dedicated field to mention their company, along with a link, might be appreciated. So within your Profile Form you’ll find some new fields for your company information. After filling out these fields, your company name and link will be displayed on your public profile.
Search
We’ve reworked our global search to use Solspace’s Super Search. The awesome flexibility of this module will hopefully return higher quality search results. For example, when searching for someone’s name, the results will first list those who have first names that match, followed by matching last names, followed by location matches, etc. The URLs of search results are also much friendlier, for those of you that like to hold onto search results. We’ve also taken advantage of Super Search in the skills matrix, by giving results of the highest relevance the highest priority in the results list. For example, those members with two of the desired skills will appear higher in the results list than those with only one of the desired skills. And those who have matching skills listed higher in their personal skills list on their profile page will be listed higher in the results than those who have matching skills listed lower in their personal skills list. We’re still working on incorporating availability into the criteria for skill-based search rankings, and we have some other visual elements we’ll be adding to the results page to make it a bit more user-friendly.
What’s Next?
We’re excited with what we were able to accomplish, but actually we barely made a dent in our list. Besides some site optimization and cleaning up of code, next on the agenda are some features that will make it easier for members, or even potential clients, to post information about projects they need help with. This will allow those interested in the community to come to them, rather than the person in need searching the community. We’ve also been asked about advertising from a few vendors. We’re considering it. If you’re interested in advertising on Director-ee give us a shout. If there’s enough additional interest we might make it a priority. There are plenty of other items on the list, but we’ll save those for another time. I think most of all we’re interested in hearing from the community what features they might like to see within Director-ee. So if you have ideas let us know!
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