I’ve set up a Student Room Youtube channel and hunted around for videos that have obviously been made by TSR users and have added them to a playlist. The only other stuff on there at the moment is a playlist of music getting rotation in the TSR office. Would be cool if TSR members could add videos to the channel but thats not possible I don’t think…It may turn out to be pointless but its pretty fun all the same. The videos made by members of different emoticons are great
Any video requests from us? A tour of the TSR office could be good?
Screengrab above from Dius.gov.uk homepage (5/02/09), click to see full size version
We’ve been working with DIUS (Dept of Innovation, Universities, Skills) since the christmas holidays on and off on a new resource for prospective mature students and today it went live to quite a national fanfare.
A map to search for an institute near you and then click for mature student specific information from that institute.
Written and Video profiles/case studies
The TSR forum and articles from Directgov and TSR.
Thanks to the members of the TSR mature student forum for getting involved in suggesting content and then by writing profiles that will be really useful to others considering returning to education.
The page will continue to grow over time, got ideas for how it could be better? Let us know.
On tuesday evening TSR had a significant site update. Most of the features in this update are things our users told us they wanted way back in the surveys we did early 2008 or during various focus groups and chats we’ve had with members prior to summer 08.
Since Summer 08 it’s been heads down getting the templates designed and functionality specced out. Then our developers have been working away for months getting the code updates onto our development site for testing.
Its been months coming and the site was down for 4 hours on tuesday night, but the general feeling is that it was worth the wait!
The updated site has a cleaner look to it. Lots of the clutter from the previous navigation has been removed or repositioned so the actual content has more prominence.
The expanding ‘Explore TSR’ button has helped with this but also the updated look of the breadcrumb navigation at the top of the site, better spacing between things, the improved positioning of ‘Advanced search’ link next to the go button rather than below it and the removal of various superfluous vertical and horizontal lines.
The big news is that you can now have TSR in your favourite colour (as long as your favourite colour is red, pink, green, blue, purple or grey). Simply click on ‘Customise your TSR’ on the homepage, select a colour and then click save at the bottom. I think purple is winning still in the favourite colour poll currently.
You can also customise the site to display what bits you want to see and where. So for example by again clicking on ‘Customise your TSR’ you can opt to have your quotes appear in the side bar wherever you are on the site, or your watched threads or the latest and most popular discussions. You can tailor those widgets to show as many as you want to see and you can drag and drop them around the homepage or up and down the side bar to position them as you choose.
TSR is such a busy site (1.9 million unique users in January!) with sooo much information it’s a challenge making that information easy to find. With the cleaner site template and customisation options we’ve introduced it should go a long way to making the site easier for new users and die hard TSR fans alike.
Of course it presents other opportunities too, future skin colours, and future widgets
