17th March 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I met with Harriet last week to discuss one of the changes that I’ve been working on for a while. At the moment Harriet writes four tuition related articles a week and uploads them to the website. The idea is to make our website more interesting for tutors and students, and to generally increase the traffic. However, I don’t really think that plan has worked as well as I had initially hoped, and after recently taking a look at the visits to our article pages it’s clear that the articles aren’t being read very much. This means 1) Clearly our tutors and students aren’t finding the articles interesting and/or can’t find them and 2) I’m probably wasting Harriet’s time by asking her to spend so long writing articles each week.
The new plan is for Harriet to spend time writing more helpful webpages, instead of articles. I mentioned a while ago that I’m going to try and stop thinking about how to get us to be ranked higher on search engines and focus on creating a really great website; those two ideas are becoming one in the same anyway as search engines become more sophisticated. It should be quite interesting for Harriet because she’s going to learn HTML, and it will keep us both a bit more focussed on how popular our pages are, and what route most students take through the website. We realised, when looking at the stats, that far too many students are using our ‘search tutor’ facility, rather than completing a new student form, and one of our first aims will be to essentially combine those two things; allow a student to browse a list of potential tutors, but only after we have enough details to search for the perfect tutor for that student.