Justgiving - front end review

You may have heard that online giving site Justgiving has had a complete makeover and re-launched over the weekend.  I thought I’d have quick look round and share some initial thoughts.

 

First up, the front page is much cleaner and has a fresher feel.  They’ve got some fantastic photos of people raising money and seemed to have made a big effort to promote the virtues of Justgiving to both individuals and charities.  Navigation is clear and it’s a good start.

 

 

 

The sponsor pages also have new look and feel and although they do look cleaner than they old version, for me they’ve lost some of the charm and warmth.  I did like the thermometer at the top of the page, which showed progress against target and the opportunities to share the page via social media were impressive  - 45 options! However, this could be off putting if you don’t have much knowledge of social media.  I like to think of myself of fairly savvy, but I hadn’t heard of half the options – may be it’s a case of less is more?

 

The first 5 donations on each page has a funny looking windmill next to them that I don’t understand and you only get 10 donations per page displayed, which means it can be quite time consuming if you wanted to scroll through and look at people’s comments.  One possible improvement would be to have a widget that scrolled through these or even a frame within the page that listed all the donations and could be easily scrolled through.  Another slight annoyance was having to click on the read more button as well to find out more about the charity.  There’s plenty of room on the page so why not display it all?

 

One great new feature is the ability to add photos and video to the site, which added to the social media functionality allows people to tell a much better story about their fundraising, which should, in theory, lead to more money being raised.

 

I started to set up a page and found the explanation screen easy to follow.  The process for setting up a page was also easy and worked smoothly.

 

The site is still running a bit slow and returning a few error messages, but my first impressions are quite good.  It's a case of evolution rather than revolution and they've resisted the urge to over complicate things, which is great.

 

I’m going to have a look at the back end and will also review the site from a charity view point later in the week.