New Year, New Design and New Features – It’s FreelanceStudents v2
16th July 2010 was a momentous day… it marked the end of our first year in operation. High 5s all around! We didn’t think we’d make it past two months, but thanks to you guys we’re still here, and looking forward to the year ahead. To celebrate we embarked on a slight re-design and re-programming [...]
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16th July 2010 was a momentous day… it marked the end of our first year in operation. High 5s all around! We didn’t think we’d make it past two months, but thanks to you guys we’re still here, and looking forward to the year ahead. To celebrate we embarked on a slight re-design and re-programming of the site. Today it gives me great pleasure to show you the final result …
New Theme
The website has a completely new design theme and now has a more modern look and feel that brings it up to a standard similar to other Web 2.0 sites. After all, we set our sites on being a modern and interactive careers resource, so we should look the part. Changes include:
- The job board area is now easier to read and navigate, and generally has a new freshness
- The footer contains new functionality (see the third section below)
- The header contains a much larger version of our logo and a new search function
- Display messages have changed and have been made larger and therefore easier to read and notice
- The home page image can now be controlled by the user to go back and forth
- The blog has a new engaging design
- And probably a whole lot more I’ve missed out!
New Search Function
We added a search box in the header area and now students can look for jobs using keywords (e.g. ‘Graphic Designer’). It makes navigating the job board much easier and improves the user experience.
Most Recent Jobs, Most Popular Jobs and Jobs Soon to Expire Display
Our footer area used to be fairly non-eventful… not any longer! The area now displays the Most Recent Jobs, Most Popular Jobs and Jobs Soon to Expire. So, no matter what page you’re visiting on the site, you’ll always have quick access to this key information. It’s a nice touch.
New Share Icons
The blog now contains a new set of cool share icons at the end of each article. Most notable is the Facebook ‘Like’ feature, which means that if you like one of our articles then clicking this button will make it easy to share it with your friends.
Site Re-programmed
To many I imagine that this title probably sounds like sci-fi gobbledygook. What this basically means is that our original underlying structure was a bit like a messy bedroom – we sort of knew where things were but it made matters complex and slowed down the website. We cleaned up the bedroom (i.e. the underlying structure) and now we know where everything is and consequently the site is much smoother.
Bugs and 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. Please contact us here or leave a message below. We’d love to know what you think of the new design.
What’s Next?
While the new site is up, we’re continuing to work on new features and upgrades. In particular building functionality to allow for CVs to be attached and quickly sent via FreelanceStudents – a move that should improve the user experience for both students and employers, and we’re also going to add additional search features to the job board.
The A Team
As ever this was a team effort, but really the driving force and the man behind the new design was our regular tech guy, Matt! Awesome Job.
