I have just had a meeting with Ken and Max. Max is preparing a proposal to bid for a project to rebuild the website for a job placement advertisement publication, and seek our partnership and assistance in this project.
I am putting down my ideas here for record purposes. I am not too optimistic about Max succeeding in the bid, and my ideas will probably go to other projects we do in the future. This is a record of my intellectual property.
I suggest that the layout and look and feel of the new website to follow that of Google or Yahoo! They spent a lot of resources on web usability to make sure that their websites are easy to use. We might well steal the results of their hard labour.
Screen layout: search box at the top in the middle. Links grouped by classification below search box. c.f. Yahoo! or Foogle.
Every job entry is a record set, fully indexed for quick searching.
To encourage visitors to register, we offer personalization facilities. Registered members get to select jobs which they are interested in, and the system learn the keywords from their selection, thereby modifying their profile and filter parameters for future job matching. Registered members also get instant SMS or email notification of newly posted jobs which match their filter criteria.
No troublesome login procedure. Once a user logs in via a cookie, the session stays forever, until user explicitly logs out.
Forget about web interface for resume submission. It’s hard to get the user interface right, and would always be more difficult to use than one’s own email client. It doesn’t offer any significant value to the users. Quite the contrary, the users give up their privacy in the form of their resumes, which is totally unnecessary.
Automatic translation of some key vocaburaries to enable some form of i18n/l10n in search.
That’s about all I can remember right now.