28th August 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A few weeks ago I said that I had changed the way that tutors and students enter qualifications, which was slightly loose with the truth. I was actually on the verge of changing it, and then realised it was much more work than I expected (I had forgotten something). It is all up and running now though, and I’m expecting to have to iron out any problems in the next few weeks. The real difficulty was with allowing people to enter the type of a qualification (A Level, GCSE etc.), because that used to be a drop down (finite) list, which made life easy if someone didn’t understand what we wanted them to enter. It’s more flexible now, but potentially more confusing too.
Also, I should apologise if anyone was frustrated with our website last Tuesday. Essentially it wasn’t working from 9am until 9pm. At one point I thought that our whole database had been deleted, which was pretty stressful (even though we have backups), but eventually we got to the route of the problem, and this time it wasn’t even our host’s fault, it was another level up; a widely used piece of software was rejecting a part of our database, and it shouldn’t have.
Technology Crises aside, the last two weeks have been great, because so many of our students have received their GCSE and A Level grades, and been really happy. We’ve also had an influx of requests from students who didn’t get the grades they wanted, and want a tutor for retakes. Obviously good for business, but it’s never nice to hear from students who are unhappy with their grades.