Vestify.com
A marketplace for investors (of any size, down to $100) to find and invest in startups. This is one of those cases where I didn't get screenshots of the client's original work. We got to the "mildly skinned wireframe" stage before the project stalled, but I'm happy with the work we did, packing a lot of information into small spaces. Startups are a particular joy for me to work with, especially if they have not brought their product to market yet, because there are so many possibilities, little resistance to change if it's obviously for the better, and an openness to doing something modern. Along with that joy, however, comes the possibility that the product will stall before it reaches the market, or key people will leave and want to change direction, or that I will have to fight to get paid. It comes with the territory.
One of the primary objects in the Vestify universe is the Project, which involves a founding team creating a business plan, explaining their proposed or existing business in detail, answering questions from the Winvest community, accepting investments and eventually launching and reporting progress. This page is the headquarters for all things Project.
Never getting past the wireframe stage, but packing a great deal of information in a small space, the dashboard shows all pertinent information at a glance for any Winvest member, whether an investor, entrepreneur, or both.
A typical form, in this case for creating a new project. I enjoy designing forms, particularly complex forms, as in this case where there are six stages to creating a new project.
Also used by all Vestify members, whether they are investors or entrepreneurs, is this inbox of alerts and action items. A mind-boggling number of events may be reported here, and the user is given the opportunity to filter them and sort them in different ways. To accommodate all these alert types I used symbols in the left column to help the user distinguish between the urgent and non-urgent and the actionable from the merely informative.
Investors can invest very small amounts, down to $100, in any Winvest project. Therefore, I reasoned, an individual investor might have a stake in dozens of projects. This is "investment central" where an investor can see everything she's invested in, or committed to invest in.
For an entrepreneur, this is the place where he can see all the investors who have invested or offered to invest in one of his projects.
A key differentiator is that anyone in the Winvest community, whether investor or entrepreneur, can ask questions of an entrepreneur regarding his project, and the answers are published for all to see.
I projected that Vestify would need about 40 different page templates, but as a startup working with limited funds it was important to keep development costs down. Where I could, I made the same template perform multiple duties. In this case, the project blog, maintained by the entrepreneurs who created the project, uses the same template as the question-and-answer page.
Even though a copyright notice is not required, here it is: Copyright © 2010 Leo Rigney.