In the 7 months we’ve been in operation FreelanceStudents has seen steady growth, with many small (and some large) businesses jumping on board and many students from across the UK signing up. To keep up with this growth, we decided to embark on a redesign of the site. It was a big effort and we’re pleased with the result…
New Navigation Bar
Our old navigation bar didn’t provide enough options and we generally felt that it was beginning to look a bit tired. We’ve updated it, and hopefully now it looks neater and it’s easier to… well… navigate around the site!
New Home Page
Perhaps the biggest change has been to the FreelanceStudents home page, which has been segmented and generally jazzed up. The old home page, whilst simple and effective, lacked immediate information on what FreelanceStudents was about. So, we’ve helpfully added a slick rotating introduction that grabs users as soon as they land.
We also listened to feedback from our users who gently advised us that the old home page was overrun with blogs. Consequently, we changed the home page to only display the latest 4 blogs along with thumbnails of the main blog image and a snippet of the full text.
A friend of ours (one of these PR types) recently said that he was “astounded” that the site didn’t reference the media FreelanceStudents has received. Er… okay. Feeling harrassed we’ve now added a section at the bottom of the home page that shows the media we’ve received and we’ll keep it updated.
Blog ‘n’ Go
As mentioned above, we’ve moved the blog from the home page. This was important because it allowed us to add features to the blog section that would not have been relevant on the home page, such as a quick view of the most popular blogs and also the blog categories (see the sidebar).
Job Alerts
Following a number of enquiries about how to sign up for job alerts, we’ve now made it easier to find the page by adding a direct link in the navigation bar. You definitely can’t miss it now :-)
New Releases
We’ve got plenty more exciting changes coming this year, some of which were intended for this update but we decided to wisely hold back and roll things out gradually. Anyway, keep your eyes peeled!
The A Team
This refresh couldn’t have been completed without our star players below. A big thanks to Emma D (often seen writing a blog or two) whose wit and wisdom kept us sane during the dark days and to Brandon, our lead developer, for his hard work and coping with our ever growing demands for more changes!
Bugs & Feedback
We do our best to ensure every release is bug free, but we’re a small team and we recognise that we can’t spot everything, so we ask (possibly urge) you to contact us if you experience anything remotely weird.
Finally, thank you to all those that have supported the site! We hope that you like the redesign. We do, but we don’t matter. So, please leave us a comment below with your thoughts.
March 8th, 2010
Dan Matthews
Good job with the redesign FS team. I think the home page looks much smarter and its’s now even easier to navigate around the site.
I haven’t come across any bugs yet but will let you know if I do.
March 8th, 2010
Tall Paul
Good stuff A Team, it looks slickety-slick. Web design asides, what’s really come along is the quality of the jobs! I’d recommend this site to any student looking for decent work/ experience. By far the best thing out there at the moment!
March 8th, 2010
Admin
Dan and Paul – thanks for your comments we appreciate it!