Top 10 Student Updates to the TeachStreet Website
August 4th, 2008 by Dave
Hello TeachStreeters — today was a big day for our little company. Of course, the big news was the launch of our service in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area (that makes it sound so corporate!), as you can read about in other blog posts below. We’ve been working so hard to make this a great launch — not only were we able to include more than 25,000 Portland classes and instructors, but we feel pretty positive that the information that’s included is more complete and more accurate than what we brought to Seattle — Portlanders, we hope you enjoy it!
We also added several hundreds Seattle teachers and classes (that we somehow missed with our April 2008 launch) including some local paragliding instructors!
In addition to all that, we also made some fairly significant changes (dare we say, improvements?!?) to TeachStreet, that we’d like to share below, in our ‘TeachStreet Top 10 Improvments’ (Note — we posted earlier about some teacher-specific TeachStreet updates)
With no further ado… here’s the Top 10! We included screenshots beneath each, to show you how to explore them yourself:
1) New Navigation — you may (or may not) notice that the ‘tabs’ on our site have changed a little bit — not only have the words changed a little (e.g. ‘Find Classes’ became ‘Learn’… ‘Teach a Class’ became ‘Teach’) but the location of them shifted a little as well. You’ll now find the Search boxes above the tabs, rather than below — hope you enjoy it!
2) New City! OK… we’ve talked about Portland quite a bit today… that’s because WE LOVE PORTLAND! If you want to check out our selection of classes in Portland, just click the link atop the site, or just search in ‘Portland, OR’ and enjoy the classes. Heck, book a trip and take some classes!
3) Better Search Results — this is hard to prove, since you can’t compare our current search results with our previous results, but we invite you to check then out by searching for something you’re interested in learning — we made a number of changes, but primarily we wanted to favor teachers and classes who have ‘claimed’ their classes on TeachStreet, who have gotten reviews, and added useful information for students — we hope they work for you!
4) New ‘Subject’ pages (here’s our ‘Seattle Swing Dancing‘ subject page, for example) — you may not have noticed before, but our old ‘Subject’ pages looked a LOT like Search Results pages — that’s because they WERE Search Results pages :-) We’ve totally revamped the Subject pages to include a few great classes, Featured Teachers, Reviews, and popular Tags, plus some other information about other people who share that subject as an Interest or Expertise — know that there’s more coming for these pages — we think they’re central to much of the future TeachStreet Experience!
5) New ‘Interests and Expertise’ give you more ways to express your Learning Interests and personal Expertise areas (i.e. things you could teach others!) You’ll see them on Subject pages throughout the site (here’s the Learn Blogging Subject page), where you can quickly add yourself to different sections such as “I’m Interested In”, “I’m Currently Learning”, “I’m a Whiz At” and/or “I’m Currently Teaching”. We hope that you’ll also find it fun to discover other TeachStreeters with similar interests… heck, maybe even send one a message!
Screenshot of ‘Interests and Expertise’ on subject page:
Screenshot of Interests and Expertise on your Profile Page:
6) More attractive ‘Learn‘ section — with our initial launch, this page looked like a pretty ugly ‘list of text links’ — now, we know it still isn’t a “10″, but we’ve tried to make it a little more compelling, and also give a better sense of the breadth of subject areas you can learn about with TeachStreet!
7) New ‘TeachStreet 101 / Intro’ section — our first ‘Learn More’ section was quite… errr… sparse. We’ve tried to spice up the Introduction to TeachStreet section with separate pages for different types of teachers (from ‘How TeachStreet helps Big Schools‘ to ‘Why TeachStreet Works for Everday Experts‘) — we hope you enjoy it!
Our TeachStreet Blog has earned ‘main navigation bar status’! Since April, the team’s blog has been treated a little unfairly — it only had a link on the bottom footer of the website. No more! You can now find the blog with a link on the top right hand corner of our header… of course, that means that it raises the bar on the quality of posts (as well as the frequency)! We hope to live up to the expectations — tell us what you think!
9) Lighter-weight e-mail templates — our first e-mail templates were pretty HEAVY — lots of blue… and then even more blue. And, if you didn’t get enough blue, we threw in some more blue… get it? Lots of blue. We tried to lighten these up a bit… of course… now there’s lots of white — we like white…
10) Two new Community Developers joined Team TeachStreet! We may have introduced them before, but we’d like to specifically welcome Ashley and Joseph, our two new Community Developers (right now, they both can be contacted with questions from folks in either Seattle or Portland… or any other city, for that matter!). They’ll be working to help both teachers and students become active on TeachStreet — if you have suggestions, give them a holler (and they’ll then holler at us!). Or, maybe suggest an event… heck, even make us buy you a coffee, or other beverage! We think they’re wonderful, and are sure you’ll find them to be as well.
