Guide to our new website

Some of our readers may remember our first “behind-the-scenes” post about the website describing our design process and gathering your feedback. Since that time in May when we launched our second batch pre-orders, we have been making some tweaks here and there, to bring you a cleaner, easy-to-use and more complete Fairphone space online. In this blog post, I want to introduce you to some of our new pages and highlight parts that we’re especially proud of.

Our road map helps you stay on track

Here at Fairphone we have many projects on the go. To make these projects a bit more accessible and relate to the full supply chain of a phone, we decided to break them up into five different action areas: Mining, Design, Manufacturing, Life Cycle and Social Entrepreneurship. Let me explain a couple of ways to access these projects.

When you first enter the road map, you will come across our customized timeline. Take your time to scroll across the pivotal moments in Fairphone history, dating back to 2012 when we first announced the launch of the Conflict-Free Tin Initiative. In each milestone you can hover above the icon to read a summary of all our activities. At the bottom of this summary, click on “Read more about related project” to jump straight to the project page relating to this activity.

To explore all our other projects, scroll down below the timeline, and you will reach the five categories, each represented by a neat little icon. Click on the action area you want to read about to enter into the overview page. This page gives you a general summary of the action area.

Scroll down the page an inch or two to reach our projects section. Here, we’re gathering our projects in one area to make it easy for you to explore what we’re doing. We work on several different projects at the same time, so we will be adding more projects surrounding social and environmental interventions as we progress.

For instance, we know it can be difficult to keep up with our work around sourcing materials for the phone and conflict-free minerals, so we created a specific project page for tin and tantalum, the two conflict-free minerals in the first Fairphone.

In each project we list the key objectives, activities and milestones as well as provide tools and resources for you to browse. If you wish to delve a little deeper, simply scroll down the page to find the list of blog posts related to that specific project.

We hope you find it easy to navigate our new road map as it lays out all the projects and milestones we’ve accumulated over the last couple years. We’re interested to hear what you think!

Library

Here, at the Fairphone office, it often feels that the number of articles, reports, videos and informative documents seem to grow at a rate faster than we can read and write them! So, we decided that the only way to tackle the mounting stacks of paper on our desks was to store and archive everything into an online library. Voila!

Press

Are you a journalist looking to explore the Fairphone story? Or maybe you want to design a class or conference around the concept of Fairphone? We’ve developed a Press section full of resources for you to get your hands on.

Grab a coffee while you browse our resources which contain ready-to-use and condensed information from technical specifications to Fairphone fact sheets. We hope that these materials can help you to write your press material and answer questions before you need to reach out to our communications team.

Events

Although we keep busy in our office in Amsterdam, we also participate in a number of industry events that we want our community to be aware of. Check our Events page to keep up to date with our Fairphone calendar. Events, conferences and the occasional party continue to pop up in our agenda. This page means that now you can keep informed and join us when we come to town!

Our new Support page is underway

With all your questions and queries coming in over the past months, our Support page has been in need of an overhaul. To bring a little order, we have decided to update it in two ways.

First, we have organized all questions into categories that follow the typical user experience: Buying a Fairphone, Orders, Delivery, Using your Fairphone, and hopefully in a time far from now: Repair, Return and Recycling. This helps to narrow down your search and hopefully it’s now quicker to find what you’re looking for.

Second, we’re trying our best to update our support articles with the most relevant information. As this requires feedback from the people who use it the most (our dear Fairphone owners), we would appreciate any ideas or feedback you can give us. Give us feedback in the comments or discuss on the forum with your suggestions. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the Fairphone video tutorials!

A website is never done

I hope this quick tour of the new website will keep you coming back for more. Our website is always evolving so we welcome your feedback in the comments below. In the coming weeks we’ll be launching some new pages – like one that encourages the Fairphone community to recycle their old phones – so stay tuned for more updates.