Proposal

In my recent post Condenser Redesign, I was able to update the code to change how posts are displayed to give steemit a more modern feel.

Aside from the complaints about steemit's existing bugs, feedback was positive and as @o1eh said:

I think the design change of steemit.com is very important. It demonstrates that the project is not only alive, but also actively developing. Currently, the prevailing opinion on the Internet is that Steem is dead, we can say that at one time there was a real propaganda campaign on this topic. A radical design change will largely disprove this thesis.

With this in mind, here is my proposal to work on Condenser with a view to modernising the steemit.com front-end.

Approach

From my experience working in a Digital Agency, I can say with a lot of confidence that "everybody's a designer". Which is another way of saying that when it comes to design, no matter the level of experience, everybody has an opinion.

This would make it extremely difficult for the opinion of one person (e.g. me) to be universally popular.

Therefore, I propose to split the project into 5 stages with stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 being iterative (i.e. design a component, build a component, test a component, deploy a component - stage 2 can begin again before stage 5 is complete).

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Stage 1: Discovery

As many of you know, Condenser (and reactJS in general) works on the idea of components. You create a component which can be used in multiple places in your site. In Condenser's case, we have Cards, Elements and Modules.

Stage 1 would involve documenting the structure of steemit.com - identifying what source code is used in each page and the associated CSS files. Steemit.com's "all.scss" file imports approximately 70 other .scss files which needs understanding.

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Stage 2: Design

Changing a page design needs agreement from stakeholders. On steemit.com, these stakeholders are many. For each page / component redesign, I'd like the community feedback which could even be initiated via contests to allow our design community to have their say... prizes would come from the steem.DAO payments I receive (which would be the equivalent to me employing a designer via Upwork or similar).

Once designs have been made available, the community could then discuss and vote on their preference.

This process could be improved but my key message here is that "I'm not going to unilaterally design a new front-end without agreement from more stakeholders."

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Stage 3: Development

This is me, bringing the design to life in code.

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Stage 4: Testing

Cross-browser, cross-platform testing.

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Stage 5: Deployment

Submission of code to GitHub, accompanied by a post outlining the changes implemented... ready for the powers that be to deploy to live.

Proposal Duration

It's always difficult to estimate how long a project of this nature will take. As mentioned above, a short "discovery" period would help to clarify the dependencies within the source code (Stage 1). As a full project, I would estimate a total cost of £25k - £30k ($32k - $38k) - which is factored into the Finances below.

I have therefore submitted a proposal to the DAO, covering 400 days (working on the assumption that it'll take time for the proposal to reach the top) with approximately 1 year of effort (at 2 days per week as indicated in the next section).

Bearing in mind the progress that I made with my initial experimenting, I think that a lot can be achieved in a time period less than a year (at 2 days per week)... at which point, the community can remove its support of the proposal or focus can move to other improvements (e.g. creating a new landing page built up from existing components - a type of "Dashboard"). It's also unknown at what point the proposal would be "approved" (if at all).

The Finances

My current situation would allow me to dedicate between 2 to 5 days per week on this project - assuming the minimum of 2 days per week, and DAO funding request would have to be adjusted to a daily proportion - i.e. 2/7 of my daily expectation.

Given the unpredictability of the price of SBD, I have worked on an average price of $3 (reflecting its recent increase and the consistent value nearer to $2.5).

Therefore, my request per day would equate to approximately £500 per week (£250 per day) and since we like round numbers, I have requested 30 SBD per day.

Addendum (4th February 2024)

https://steemit.com/hive-151113/@the-gorilla/dao-proposal-addendum

🙏 Please Support this Proposal

You can view and vote for proposals by following this link...

👉 https://steemitwallet.com/proposals 👈

I'll expand this proposal to include any answers to questions from within the comments so please don't hesitate to comment and feed back.