Tweaking the front page

This long weekend has meant I’ve had some more time to spend working on Constructiv. Something I’ve been considering for a while now is a revised front page. These tweaks include a number of key items.

• ‘What is Constructiv’ video – This is something I’ve often seen Jason Calacanis of http://thisweekinstartups.com criticize companies for not having. I have to agree. Although we have the slider with promotion images that will help form a new user’s opinion of what the site is about, a short video to explain it is important.
• Featured users – From the outset Constructiv aims to highlight the ideas people and reward them for contributing to the site and industry. Those with a pro account will be added to a rotator on the front page. This will also continue to be used to feature Constructs that get approved by business.

So that’s the design update for now, the changes will take a little time to implement, so stay tuned. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Twitter integration coming soon

Based on user feedback, I’ve increased twitter integration in the development priorities.

As you can see from the MetroTwit screen shot below, I’ve started posted from the development app called Constructiv.

Thanks to a great tutorial from the guys over at 4GuysFromRolla, this will be the building blocks of twitter integration. The goal is to allow users to signup and signin to Constructiv using their Twitter accounts, just as Facebook users can today.

The trick here is that twitter also needs to integrate with an existing ASP.Net Membership provider for those that choose to use manual accounts. Of course there’ll need to be the ability link a standard account with twitter if the user changes their mind after signup. Subsequently, this also exists for Facebook.

It’s a different API, but ultimately Twitter also uses OAuth for the authentication / callback process, so development should be fairly rapid. I’d expect to have most of the Twitter integration sorted by the end of this weekend.

New Business Verification page

I felt the reasons for entering into the business verifications process weren't explained well. The solution is a brand new Business Verification page. You will find multiple locations (mostly around the business pages) that link to this page.

Alternatively, you can just check it out at http://constructiv.co/BusinessVerify.aspx

Mobile site now available

Constructiv mobile VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Over the weekend the mobile site for Constructiv got an update. You can see the original mobile site here in a previous post. The mobile site now simplifies the data displayed to match a smaller display.

While there’s a limit set of functionality available when accessing from a mobile device, its a much better experience than panning and zooming around the site.

To check out the mobile Constructiv site, just access http://constructiv.co from a mobile device. The site has been tested on an iPhone 4S, with additional device support and screen resolutions coming in the future.

Autocomplete Business Name

The latest update introduces autocomplete for Business names. If the Business already has an entry in the Business table, the user only needs to type the first few characters then select from the list.

This change will increase data consistency and avoid someone entering ‘Hewlett Packard’ when HP already exists. I wanted to steer away from a drop down / limited set of companies as new businesses release new products everyday and this needs to scale.

Early testing of autocomplete was done using a defined list, however this solution implements the jquery autocomplete which uses the database for a source.

This feature was added thanks to feedback from Michael Kordahi. You can leave suggestions by visiting the Feedback page.