Week 045 — Welcome Page, FAQ, and Image Cleanup

One week before launch, the work turns outward — the things a stranger sees first.

Week of September 22, 2025

Progress

Monday cleaned up the found and found-success pages. The unregistered finder notice was inconsistent with the rest of the app's inline notice styling, and the return-option buttons needed visual work. Both done.

The welcome page became the main project Tuesday through Thursday. The core feature: a rotating tagline engine that cycles through pre-written taglines and tracks which ones drive new account creation. Each tagline gets impression counts and conversion counts, backed by a JSON file set as an env constant. The tagline file's path caused a subtle bug — functions that read and wrote to the JSON were operating at the filesystem level, which made using the URL (rather than the file path) invalid. Once that was sorted, the engine worked correctly including graceful failure if the file can't be found.

The welcome page also got graphics to explain how srchParty works, icons linking to specific FAQ anchor sections, and a sign-up button.

The FAQ page was built Thursday and Friday: routing added, layout designed, initial content written.

Image storage got restructured at the end of the week. Two changes: all images now have explicit file extensions, and different image types (items, lost items, avatars) are stored in separate folders. Neither was strictly necessary pre-launch, but doing it now avoids a messier migration later. The image processing logic was refactored to enforce both rules.

The Question That Appeared

Humor vs. emotion in taglines. The first tagline session produced lines that leaned on both — some wry, some earnest. The question of which register converts better is the whole point of tracking impressions and conversions, but the question still has to be answered up front when deciding what to write. No clean resolution, so the first set includes both and the data will sort it out.

Next Week

Subscription reward allocation — the feature that gives subscribers points when they pay.