Dear Families,

I have had several comments on the new format for posting candidates.

On BCCandidates.com, the candidates page was presented as a page full of pictures (headshots) of the candidates, and each was a link to the specific candidate's information. When we moved to Absolutelove.org, in response to feedback we changed the format so there was no page full of pictures. Instead, each candidate was identified by their country and month + year of birth, and the date their profile was posted.

I have generally received positive feedback on this, and I think it improves the chance that more people will post their information to the website. The candidates have the ultimate say in whether their picture / info is submitted, and I think the further we can distance the site from the "meat market" perception, the more people will agree to use it. Also, I feel that it is more appropriate to show the person's information on their internal aspects first, and show their picture second.

On the practical side, some parents have asked that I change to something similar to the older format, because it is difficult when visiting the page to determine which candidates they have already viewed, and which they haven't.

There are a couple solutions I see for this.

1. To have a small thumbnail picture of each candidate next to the link. The picture could be quite small, but enough to tell if it's a candidate you've already seen. I feel comfortable with this workaround, since it would be quite small and for recognition purposes only, but it does represent a departure from how the site was initially set up.

2. Candidates could choose an icon, or avatar to identify them (similar to blog sites) that would be posted next to the country / birth date info. They could send this in with their application. However, as many parents are not web-savvy, speak another language, etc, adding another layer onto the application process may not be a good thing. I could arbitrarily add icons to each candidate, but I am not certain that this will go far enough in distinguishing one from another.

Let me know if anyone has comments or suggestions on this. I'll take comments for this week and see what the outcome is.

Thanks,

Mike Stewart

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