Welcome to day two of the useaffiliates.com build log! This series covers my journey of building a business from scratch in public. If you missed day one, you could check it out here. I also uploaded today's Twitch stream to YouTube if you want to watch the replay.
Yesterday we worked on coming up with a design language. We explored font pairs and even made a couple of variants for the homepage. However, when I looked at the designs today, I wasn't happy with what I designed yesterday.
The designs looked too dull, and I wouldn't want to use a site that looked this way. More importantly, the page was missing a lot of functionality, including filters, which for a listing site, the users must get to their content quickly.
I changed my mind on only using black and white as the color pallet. The site didn't have any personality, and once I stumbled upon a shade of orange when searching for a header image for the home page, I was sold. Adding in the orange color pallet lifted my design from "meh" to "hey, I am on to something here!".
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Having found some personality via the color pallet, I also reworked how the data is listed. I took inspiration from famous job boards and placed the data into rows instead of columns.
Besides it making the data appear more structured (as opposed to cluttered columns variant), it also gave me a lot more horizontal space to work with. I utilized this extra space to include more helpful information about the affiliate programs without cramping it all inside a column.
The added benefit of listing the data underneath each other is that it makes it easy for users to compare the different affiliate programs' data.
Now that we have this extra space for more data, I also added three dropdown filters at the top of the list. This will make it a lot easier for creators to find an affiliate program that suits their needs without scavenging their way through many programs that are of no interest/relevance to them.
Finally, I added a "sponsored" label to the first two rows as I plan to let affiliate programs pay an extra sum for getting to the top of the list. I want to be transparent to the users when a program is sponsored, and it might even be required by law here in the EU (I only assume this since it's required for influencers on social media).