How we built The Writer’s Room
The Writer’s Room is a community of creative storytellers that offers a space for Nigerian writers to learn, grow, connect and share their stories. The community started to grow, and they needed a website where members could spend hours conversing, sharing resources and learning from each other.
Asides from telling wonderful stories at wuruwuru, we aim to support creatives in the industry. This project was more of a collaboration to connect writers in the ecosystem for us than just setting up a website/forum.
Here’s how it went…
The initial plan was to set up the forum using an open-source platform called Flarum. Flarum is a free and highly customisable platform created specifically for website forums. There are two methods to set up a forum using Flarum:
- Installing using the composer. This method requires a software engineer proficient with PHP.
- Free Flarum, is an easy method that requires only an email address and a password to set up a forum.
We had a time constraint for the project, so we couldn’t hire a software engineer to help set up the forum using the composer method. We also considered the cost of running and maintaining the site.
For Free Flarum, a bunch of engineers came together to create an easy method for people with little technical knowledge to set up a forum. Although they ask for a little donation to keep their services up, the downsides to this method were:
- They hosted the forums on their servers, so you’re entirely relying on them to keep your forum running.
- The dashboard consisted of all the features Flarum offered. The Writer’s Room team found this hard to navigate.
Over a call, Nicole (Founder of The Writers Room) mentioned that she tried designing posters and setting up a forum in the past using Wix.
She had some content sitting on it already but couldn’t navigate building the rest of the website, so she abandoned it. Opemipo suggested we examine the website Nicole had built and look into Wix and its capabilities. We agreed to proceed with Wix and paid for a combo plan to remove the ads.
Brand Identity
Nicole already hired a designer Abiola Adejare to create an identity for The Writer’s Room. He designed the logo, chose the brand colours and selected the typeface.
The brand identity suggested a toned-down and sleek feel, but the combination of the typefaces didn’t give the site that sleeky feel we were trying to achieve for the site. I decided to explore typefaces that match Gourmet Le French Script and selected Cormorant. This article was crucial to making that decision.
Website Design
We started by creating a site map and a website layout on Figma. The website consists of a landing page introducing visitors to The Writer’s Room, an about page explaining the mission, a room which is the forum, a how to use the room page, and a resources page.
The most tasking part of designing the website was figuring out how to organise the Resources page. The resources are a growing list of classic movie scripts and writing materials, and it was necessary to structure the page in a way that made it easy to browse through. Wix doesn’t have a function for searching within a page, so I decided to use anchors within the page.
Translating to Wix
I found Wix pretty intuitive to navigate. I didn’t need to take any course before implementing the designs, everything was well labelled and described, and I was a google search away from an answer to any problems I encountered.
The only issue I had was using my eyes to measure most of the content alignment because I couldn’t find any function to show me the height difference between blocks.
Usability Test
From the start, we recognised the importance of setting up an easy-to-use forum to keep the engagement going, so we prioritised the user experience for both the writers on the forum and the writer’s room core team.
To get reliable feedback and kick off the forum with organic content, Nicole reached out to a number of writers that showed up to a workshop The Writer’s Room organised earlier this year via email. Ten (10) of them were interested in helping us kick off the website.
I was curious about how easy it’ll be for people to navigate the forum, so I set up the following tasks for the writers to complete:
- Create an account
- Change Display Name and Profile Picture
- Leave a comment under a post
- Create a new post under any categories
- Suggest any categories you think might be helpful
Then I created a feedback form using Airtable to know how easy or hard it was for them to complete these tasks. The writers completed the tasks we set for them without expressing any pain points. For that reason I consider the usability test a success.
How Room Works
We gradually introduced more people to the site and found that most of them were confused about how to start a conversation in the Room. The usability test was probably successful because the first ten (10) writers we introduced to the site had a set of rules to guide them. Nicole suggested we create a page explaining in detail how to start conversing in the Room.
What I learnt
I learned to create a handoff document detailing everything The Writer’s Room team will need to navigate the website. This document will also give me clarity in a situation where I need to troubleshoot a problem in the future.
