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Home page
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Business sign-up page
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volunteer sign-up page
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businesses listing page
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business profile page
Inspiration
When Daniel developed a website for a local barber shop in 2019 pro bono, he wondered if he could connect other students and professionals with local businesses. Daniel started by connecting the people and businesses around him, but he’s always wanted a more efficient solution: one that could benefit more than just the people he knew.
Recently, we have been watching as our favorite businesses have been forced to lay off portions of their workforces or even close down. Our communities are built by small businesses, and watching them struggle has been heartbreaking. With the emergence of Covid-19 and all the problems the virus brings with it, we knew there had to be a way for people to help their communities survive. With this in mind, we decided to create a platform where people can contribute their time and knowledge to help businesses in their area.
What it does
Running a small business is hard in the best of times. Sadly, these are not the best of times. Many local businesses have had to lay off significant portions of their workforce and most are either closing or moving their operations online. CovidBizLink is a platform that helps local businesses connect with skilled volunteers (Accountants, Developers, Lawyers, etc) who are able to provide necessary services. Services can include projects such as setting up an online marketplace, seeing if there are any force majeure clauses in a business’s lease or even general mentorship!
How we built it
Our platform, available at https://covidbiz.link/, allows volunteers to create profiles highlighting their skills and businesses to create profiles that highlight what services they would find most helpful. When someone is available to fill a business's needs, we provide the necessary means of contact. Hopefully, this pro bono assistance will help alleviate the burden of running a business during these tough times and provide volunteers the knowledge that they are helping people in their communities.
Challenges we ran into
None of us had much experience working on front end design so creating a website was new to all of us. Although we were able to Live Share through a VS Code plugin, only one person at a time was able to edit our Bootstrap Studio Files. Bootstrap Studio did not function properly with git versioning, which required us to share the HTML and JavaScript files independently. Instead, we had to update our design continually as changes were made in the GitHub repository. This led to some major slowdowns since we were unable to work in parallel.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team consists of five high school students aged 14 through 18, and most of us have never met in person. We are proud that we were able to effectively get to know each other and communicate effectively over voice chat. We were able to create a beautifully designed yet extremely utilitarian website in under three days. Not only are we extremely proud of how quickly everything came together, but we also all learned a new program, language, or library.
What we learned
Most of our development team has extensive experience with Python and are comfortable working on the back end of projects. This, however, provides some difficulty when we need to work on a consumer-facing product. Turns out, most people don’t want to interact with a program over the command line. Who knew! This meant that we had to learn how to make a front end which was new to us all and turned out to be a great experience. We learned to efficiently design websites using Bootstrap and discovered the ins and outs of user authentication, data management, and data storage. As a team, we learned how to communicate effectively over Discord, recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and accordingly distribute work.
What's next for CovidBizLink?
We hope that CovidBizLink will help communities come together while we all tackle the unique challenges dealt to us by Covid19. Although our website is fully functional, there is so much more we can do! We would like to add more graphical elements into our UI to make it easier for users.
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