Learn how we’re improving the ELIX website in this week’s update

This week, we unveil design and development updates focused on improving the look and usability of our website. Keep reading to learn about all the exciting improvements we’re planning for ELIX.

Start Exploring

ELIX is a great way to find new products and ideas. Start browsing products and campaigns today on our Explore page here.

Design Improvements

We’re working on changes and improvements to make the homepage more lively. Below is a proposed change to the open section of the website, showing a slideshow of all recently approved products and campaigns. At any point, a viewer can access each product by clicking during the slideshow.

There’s also the option to add a collage, or groups of images from different products below the above upper section. A group of images could look like so:

We will likely end up with a combination of the two.

Recently we’ve been working on an updated way for users to select their interests when browsing the ELIX homepage. Below, we show Category selection options for the homepage from our design partner Jane & Rosello.

Jane & Rosello are also working on shipping checkout flows to make it easy for customers to view shipping options relevant to their specific location when checking out.

Lastly, the design firm is adding ways to differentiate between products and campaigns while using the dashboard. Such a setup could also be applied to the Explore page as well.

When people back a campaign, they’ll see something like this:

The Activity page will help track contributions and purchases. We also plan to incorporate ways for backers and creators to discuss final details around delivery.

Development

This week in development we’ve finished moving our new search engine optimized routing hierarchy to production as well as adding slugs for campaign and product routes. Search engines frequently alter their algorithms but always highly value organized websites with ample keyword usage and no keyword cannibalization (low redundancy across the application). This has been a big pain point of dynamically rendered node applications for a while because most web crawlers are unable to render HTML documents from javascript but having server side rendering implemented gives search engines full access to our pages. Hierarchical routing with slugs derived from project titles and owner names that are also featured prominently in the document will improve the quality of every project backlink so when creators share their project links publicly on social media or other websites there will be a greater chance of those URLs ranking higher on search engines. Now as we finish development, we can feel confident that generated content will provide the best return to creators for their time!

Organizing website content by route also creates an optimal structure for bundling into feature modules: implementing this across the application will drastically reduce the bundle size, resulting in a faster response time and a better experience for mobile users and users with poor connections. Style updates include cleaning up mobile styling on the detail view page, and adding more prominent card animations. We have further reduced bundle size by removing redundant DOM elements and styles, and by leveraging performance improvements in updates to some application dependencies. We’ve also changed the explore page to randomize projects by default so users will have an easier time finding new projects when browsing.

That’s all for this week! Start exploring products and campaigns on ELIX here and create your own here.