Location: University City (contractor can be anywhere)
We are a team of science educators based in Philadelphia. We usually visit schools to provide live educational programs. We’re piloting an engineering challenge for science students across the country. We’re about to receive a small grant to make the site beautiful so we can seek support to continue and grow it.
We built a site and ran the challenge this spring, and the response was wonderful. We’ve been working out the bugs and have been realizing most of them are about usability. We’ve come to realize that just because the instructions and links are on the home page does not mean participants will find or follow them. You can see our work at www.potatochipchallenge.com.
Your foci should be on aesthetics and usability – make it beautiful and self-managing for users. It will be used primarily by teens and teachers. Our backend is PHP and MySQL based, and we have someone on staff who has already coded a working database. We need someone to make it look good and work well. We can do some of the PHP implementation, but if you can help in that effort, so much the better.
Here are some specifics we’re looking for:
Design
- Coherent graphic design/branding of site
- School friendly (K-12)
- Clean and attractive to teens – our primary focus
- Usability is most important
Technical
- Fully compliant xhtml/css/js (must validate)
- no flash navigation
- must integrate with existing php/mysql backend (we will do most of the integration)
- Possible help on integrating wiki-style elements (blog, user pages, etc)
Contact: 215-382-4280; scriptmonkey@potatochipchallenge.com
Compensation: Please submit a link to a digital portfolio of past work, and please let us know approximate costs of pieces similar to your examples. If you prefer an hourly rate, please give examples of pieces and how many hours they took.
