Inspiration
Our entire team is incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about personal finance. After teaching ourselves about this subject, we’ve found that there are very few simple resources that guide average Canadians through the different facets of finance. There are many amazing books and websites that focus on personal finance, but many people just don’t know where to start. We have tried giving these resources to family and friends; however, the majority of them have found these to be too intimidating. As a team, we wanted to build an entry point for Canadians to learn the fundamental basics of personal finance.
What it does
Our team developed a simplistic website that guides Canadians through five main pillars of personal finance: budgeting, debt, money savings accounts, investing, and other life goals (cars, housing and insurance). The website uses concise statements and friendly animations to convey these complex concepts. Ultimately, the user will be equipped with a basic understanding of financial literacy before embarking on a more detailed evaluation of their needs.
How we built it
We used HTML, CSS and jQuery to make the website and external CSS libraries such as Animate.js and Textillate.js for animations. With a combination of novice and expert programmers, our team utilized Git as our version control system and used a combination of individual and pair (extreme) programming.
Challenges we ran into
We encountered several challenges while developing our website. The first and most difficult challenge was generating the content. Due to the intimidating nature of the subject matter, we spent a significant amount of time deciding on what to include, what to omit, how to explain concepts, and how to order them.
From a technical standpoint, one of the first challenges we overcame was contrasting programming backgrounds of our team. Half of the team were novice programmers and half were experienced, so a lot of time was spent mentoring. However, this enabled the novices to successfully contribute to the project. Another big challenge we faced was incorporating animations in a reusable way (rather than hard-coding every animation for each section). These animations also took a lot of time to plan and implement.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team successfully created the beginning of a simplistic, well-designed website. We made an animation framework, wrote all of the website content, and created mockups for much of the content. Another accomplishment was that two non-experienced team members learned HTML and CSS and contributed to the project. All in all, we finished what we set out to do in this hackathon.
What we learned
We learned that well-designed, animated websites are difficult to create in 36 hours. Also, it is crucial to present information in an easily digestible format due to the subject matter. In terms of developing, we learned that pair (extreme) programming is an efficient and quick way to get things done and teach new programmers.
What's next for FinLit - A Canadian Financial Literacy Website
We would like to finish migrating data to the website. We’d like to buy a domain name, host the website, and have it tested by friends and family. Lastly, we’d like to explore the possibility of using better front-end frameworks such as Sass or Angular.js.
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