Kleen Kuts

Inspiration

The recent events that unfolded in Davis, with a serial killer targeting vulnerable individuals, left the city of Davis with a profound sense of empathy and concern for the victims and everyone else involved. These incidents not only caused fear and distress within the unhoused community, but it also spread throughout the entire community, producing a collective sense of urgency to address the vulnerabilities and challenges faced by those without safe and stable housing.

This compelled us to want to do something, even in the smallest of ways, to address this issue. Inspired by our friend Kurtis, whose passion for cutting hair has brought joy and confidence to our circle of friends, the idea of “Kleen Kuts” was born. We found this to be the perfect mix of combining passion, skills, and giving a helping hand to those who need it most. By providing free haircuts to the homeless, we hope to make steps toward breaking the barriers that often hinder access to stable employment, thus supporting their journey towards financial independence, stability, and improved quality of life.

What it does

The Kleen Kuts website is an easily accessible resource that allows users to learn about our purpose, book hair appointments, and/or donate to the cause. It also provides a way for local barbers to contribute to the barber team. We linked contact information conveniently and made the overall site easy to navigate. Since those who are unhoused most likely only have access to mobile devices at most, we made it available on mobile.

How we built it

Using text editors, we constructed and edited html and css files, occasionally using js scripts in addition. We used multiple different embeds and different API’s to achieve the result we wanted in our code. Despite our inexperience, we worked diligently to create a website which has the foundation and capability to connect the unhoused with barbers. When designing the website, we created our own logos and backgrounds using photoshop, while also setting up cross-platform tools such as calendly and youtube to add more to our site. Our large css file dictated the standard formatting for all of our html files, which included a donation page, an about page, a page to register for appointments, and a google forms application to sign up as a barber. To support animations and other features of our website, we also coded a few simple JavaScript scripts which allowed us to do things not normally possible in just css and html.

Challenges we ran into

There were many difficulties that we ran into along the way when making our project. Once we had our idea and began coding our website, we realized that all of us had little to no experience with html/css/js. This posed a large challenge, especially timewise, as it took a lot for each incremental step in our process. Along the way, many bugs and errors were encountered. One of our biggest problems outside of our code was our different devices not syncing properly. When we would upload a version of the project, it would load differently on all of our devices, and dealing with these inconsistencies took a great deal of work. Even simple tasks like moving around elements and containers was a big struggle, but as the night progressed we learned more and more, and were able to take bigger and bigger steps towards our vision. The final, and most difficult challenge was getting the website up and running on our mobile devices. With the different dimensions and properties of a mobile device, attempting to convert the program with the same css file, especially with us having no experience doing so, was extremely arduous, and took us well into the night and morning to even complete in its current state.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Going into this project, our whole team didn't have much experience working with HTML/CSS and so we're proud of how we were able to make a fully-functioning website with graphics and functionalities that we built from scratch, especially given all the roadblocks we hit working with CSS and getting it to run on mobile devices.

On a less technical side, we're proud of the amount of knowledge gained through a series of trials and error made in a short amount of time. Lastly, we're proud of our how we were able to initiate using our friend's passion for cutting hair and using it for the greater good.

What we learned

We gained an intense amount of experience working with HTML/CSS working on this project. We also learned the differences between creating a mobile format versus a desktop format.

What's next for Kleen Kuts

There are quite a few things which we have to continue to work on for our project. We still need to finish setting up our donation page, and continue working on our mobile proportions. In the future, we would love to develop an app instead of a website on mobile, which would give us much more freedom and make it easier for us to extend the full visual experience of our desktop website to a mobile format.