Will Barrett (Poetry School)A quick word from our Digital Programme Producer…
So why has this all happened? Well, our existing website was coming up to its sixth birthday, which is practically ancient in digital dog years, and as good a reason as any to give the site a fresh look.
More importantly, both CAMPUS and everything else the Poetry School offers will now be brought under one roof. Anyone with a Poetry School or CAMPUS profile will be able to both book courses and workshops, receive our newsletter, and interact on CAMPUS, without having to switch sites and hopscotch about with various usernames and passwords.
We have been so encouraged by the success of CAMPUS we felt it should be embedded more directly within the Poetry School’s our organisational structure and general way of working. CAMPUS has grown to become much more than just a place where our online courses happen – it is its own, fully-fledged poetry community, and has created significant opportunities for us to connect with poets and new audiences. It has become significant part of how we operate as a complete poetry entity, from running courses, to marketing, audience development, and collaborating with other organisations.
We’ve also tried to correct the many design and technical snags to CAMPUS and our old site, and to improve areas where we though the user experience was lacking. Many of these improvements have been made with real, hard data to back them. With help from independent evaluators, student surveys, and a Bible-thick stack of data analyses, we have be able to discover important insights into how CAMPUS works, who CAMPUS reaches, patterns of learning and interaction, &tc – that have allowed us to make a site that more closely resembles what our students and poets want to use.
I’ve put together a handy list of some of the new, innovations and fixes we’ve brought to the site, which you can read over here: http://www.poetryschool.com/blog-2/woah-look-new-stuff/
There will also be a user guide to the new look CAMPUS, which we will launch shortly.
In the coming weeks I’m also going to write in more detail about some of the interesting research findings from the first couple of years of working on CAMPUS. I trust you all like bar graphs!
So here we have it. Almost a year’s worth of wrestling with code, plugins, loop queries and other techno-trickery. It’s been a very ambitious project rationalising too quite different websites, as well as developing a new CRM system, database and a design that is both mobile and PC friendly. I really hope we have created something that both retains our existing strengths and removes some of our existing weaknesses.
It is a brand new site so please tread a little carefully – the paintwork will be a little wet in a few areas – but with a little wearing in, it should make a fetching new home for us all.
Gut-shot feedback most welcome in the comments section!
Campus looks great; there is a more logical flow to the chronological feed. It feels more intuitive now. Thank you.
Good news! And fresh looking indeed! I can’t wait to give it a try. Thank all of you who worked hard on it.
Looking good, and I like the edit facility. Unfortunately, I’m struggling to post things. (If this works, it’ll contradict me of course).
OK, so it seems I can post here. I currently can’t post anything in my course group (Long Poems); it just says there’s a problem and to try again later. It’s being doing this since yesterday. Before that I did manage to post, but it took a couple of attempts and some messing around.
Where is the full new user guide, please? Can you publish the full URL? I can’t find it. Thanks.
HI Jinny – you can find it here: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/poetryschool/assets/uploads/2016/05/05181208/CAMPUS-mini-guide1.pdf
That’s good news! Hopefully we’ll get it working as good as it looks
It is dreadful – totally unuser-friendly and inexpressably frustrating. I have enjoyed PS courses over the last 5 years but I feel the excellent teaching is being undermined by 1000 non-responsive links and time-sucking lsck of speed. Grrrr. I don’t care about the ‘cool’ new stuff. What are we? Teenagers from 1971? Just get the basics right snd stop trying to be digiwhizz icons
Hi Cathy, really sorry you’re experiencing such difficulties with the new site. We are constantly improving the performance and working out the niggling problems.
As things are tinkered with and resolved, it is a good idea to log out, clear your browser’s cache, close the window and then log back in again. Web browsers store links/pathways/information – so when some of those are changed it results in the website seeming to slow down hugely and ending up with non-responsive links.
As I don’t know what browser you’re using, it’s probably best to google ‘How to clear cache in Firefox/Chrome/IE’ for a quick guide if you’re not familiar with the process. I hope you notice some different after that.
We appreciate your feedback and your patience,
James