13th October 2014 9:35
By Blue Tutors
It has been ages since I wrote my blog. It's not because nothing's been going on, far from it, but the old reason for writing something here was to make sure that new content was added regularly, every week in fact. A few months ago I changed all that, and decided that instead we're only going to add content when our tutors and students might want to read it, and not because some SEO executive has told me to.
I'm really quite excited about what I'm doing at the moment. For the last few weeks I've been busily working on a new way to match our tutors to our students. There won't really be a headline difference at first because the system we currently use is pretty good and, to an extent, I'm working on the basis of 'if it 'aint broke don't fix it'. However, I'm improving the information we record. For example, the end date of a student's tuition has always just been recorded as text, which meant that we also had to add a date to the database when we would cancel the student's request. This was really silly, and just duplicated information, so I'm fixing all problems like that (there are loads!). Short term this will mean that Harriet's life will be a little bit easier; there will be less information to enter from each student which will speed things up.
The real benefit of what I'm doing, though, will only start to become clear after a few months. The new system will actually allow tutors to be matched to students automatically, and theoretically a student could complete a new student form online and be put in touch with their tutor without anyone at Blue Tutors being aware of what has happened. I'm sure the instinctive reaction to this is that it's a little cold, and not an improvement at all, but you'll have to trust me that it will be a massive improvement because it is so complex and will consider lots more than Harriet or I can. Also, the reason this will take a few months to work is because I'm going check and double check everything before I even think about automating. Only once I'm sure that something can be done quicker and better without my or Harriet's input will I change things.
I'm sure that you've also noticed the new design of the website, which is part and parcel of everything I've mentioned above. I can't tell you how many suggestions we had to modernise the site, and while I resisted for a while simply because we seemed to still be attracting lots of new students, this seemed like a great time to make the change, and I'm very happy with the result. Lots of pages still need to be tinkered with, but bear with us, it's going to keep getting better over the next few months.