Expected duration: 1 - 2 weeks My client is a small grant-making charity in the UK. They currently use a very basic website, this is intentional. Basic means no pictures, no contact forms, no traffic generation, no social media, no links. The charity makes a limited number of grants per year up to the level of low four-digit amounts per application.
The contract partner for the web-developer is me, Michael M. The ultimate user is the charity. The charity can pay fair market going rates for the project. We struggle a little to find out how big or small our budget needs to be. In some ways I’d think this is done in a few hours, but I have been long enough in the industry to know that the devil can be in the detail.
Applicants for grants of this charity all come from the UK and will typically be charities themselves. A small proportion of applications does come from around the globe, they still need to be linked to a UK registered charity.
We want to replace the current website with a Wordpress website, based on a Studiopress/Genesis theme we have yet to choose. Genesis would give us a solid foundation for the future, it might be possible or even advisable to work on a WP-provided standard theme.
The development of the website is included in this project. As the website is rather simple, this will hardly make the project much bigger. The majority of the work will be in the Application Form.
The current website has four sections that need to be replicated on the new website: 1. Home (Name of charity, vision statement, ca. 370 words, 2400 chars) 2. Funding (Funding principles and rules, ca. 290 words, 2000 chars) 3. Apply (Application guidance ca. 430 words, 2800 chars) 4. Contact/Solicitors (contact details, 85 words, 500 chars)
For the application form we are thinking about using Gravity Forms, but would happily listen to reasons why we should choose something else.
Applicants fill out a form that currently runs on Jotform.com, the current form is attached as a PDF. We found that this solution is unfortunately not very stable and unnecessarily complex to use for the admin staff of the charity. For this reason we will have to migrate away from Jotform.
The form has currently about 90 fields/questions in 10 groups. A newly designed application form should include a sensible set of plausibility checks (e.g. only numbers can be entered in numeric fields, a charity number has a certain format, email addresses and URL’s need to be valid, etc.) Applicants should be able to revisit a form that was only partially filled in. The first version of the new form does not need to have this “revisit” feature, but we’d like to have the “revisit” feature eventually.
Data from submitted applications should be exported for further work into a locally held Excel spreadsheet, or viewed and assessed online. Applicants should receive an automated submission confirmation. To export submissions into an EXCEL sheet seems to be the most straightforward approach, but is maybe not the wisest, given the length of the form with 90 fields.
We listed this project with a budget of £500, in a way we think it might be available for less. However, if you think this budget is nowhere near big enough, tell me why. I can and will listen!
I will provide an online-staging environment for the development of the new site with Wordpress as our CMS and the chosen theme. This will include a Gravity Forms licence if required.
The work should start immediately. We want to go live by end of February, if earlier is possible, all the better.
Once the work has started, daily progress reports will be required. Ownership of your finished work after payment needs to be transferred to us. No sub-contracting or outsourcing of this work is permitted.
For this assignment you need to be comfortable working with British spelling throughout, we are happy to lend you our infinite wisdom on this. Also, a sense of humour wouldn’t go amiss.
Finally, please answer these questions:
1. Have you ever used Gravity Forms? When and for what? 2. How long do you think this will take? 3. How long have you been working in webdesign? 4. Do you see yourself as a web-designer or as a web-developer? 5. Why do you like working in web-design? 6. Are you comfortable with using the Gutenberg Blocks editor? 7. Please tell me why you are the best person to hire. 8. Do you have a dog/cat/goldfish or neither? 9. How many projects do you work on at present? 10. How will you solve upcoming problems?
