StudyStays Blog

Receiving alerts for new listings or registrations

As StudyStays administrators, you can now choose to receive emails when new listings and student registrations need your approval

Notify
This will send you a email with a few details about the new listing or registration as soon as it's added, with a link that you can click to follow up (it might ask you to sign in first).

If you already have an admin account, this feature won't be turned on automatically. Here's how to turn it on...

How to enable notifications:
  1. Sign in as an administrator, and go to your dashboard by clicking your email address at top-right
  2. Click the “Edit my administrator details” link to edit your details
  3. As in the screen shown above, tick the box to “Notify when new listings or registrations need approval” (don't forget to save!)
How to disable notification (2 options):
  1. Follow the steps above for enabling notifications, but obviously you'll un-tick the box so you won't receive notifications
  2. Click the link at the bottom of a notification email for a new listing or registration (it says “You can turn off notifications here”), and then un-tick the “Notify...” box.

Notes for providers, and exporting notes

About 5 months ago, I redesigned notes. Then I added notes for students.

But I held back on adding notes to providers. My thinking was that it was more useful to have notes about specific listings, and these would show up when you viewed a provider's details. But it left the providers page feeling a bit “left out”, and sometimes you really do want to add a note about the provider, not the listing. (Thanks to the people who pointed that out!)

So I'm happy to say, you can now add notes directly to providers.

Notes export
A small, but hopefully useful addition: when you export students, listing or providers; all the notes attached will also be downloaded in a separate column.

Using Google Analytics

In addition to the built-in reports in StudyStays, Google Analytics can give you a lots of detailed information about how people use your StudyStays website—like where they're from, how they got there and what pages they visited.

Image
A sample page from Google Analytics

If you're already familiar with Analytics, you can create a new Web Property and add the tracking ID through Admin > Settings > Website settings (you need to be a super-admin to do this).

If, on the other hand, you've never used Analytics and that last sentence was complete gibberish to you, we can help you get it set up quickly.

Quick setup:
  1. Create a new Google account.
    Hint: use a generic email address that other people in the accommodation service can access, if you can. That way other staff members can see the Analytics reports too.
  2. Email us and let us know the email address for the Google account you just created.
We'll set it all up for you, and then you'll be able to log in to Analytics and start getting all analytical.

Old web browsers

Your web browser is the program you use to access web sites. Some examples of web browsers are Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Browser-icons

You might not know it, but you could be using a web browser that's 10 years old. With the fast development pace of technology, if you're using a browser that's even a year old, you’re not getting as good an experience as the people who are using a modern browser. And you probably won't be seeing StudyStays the way it's meant to look.

If you're not sure what browser you're using, you can find out here. If it's not a modern browser, it'll show you when it was released. Internet Explorer 6, for example, was released in August 2001 and is now a relic from a time when the internet was much slower, uglier and harder to use.

If you find out that your browser is quite old—say Internet Explorer 8—the good news is that there are lots of modern browsers available, and they're all completely free to download and install. Examples are Google Chrome (my favourite), Apple's Safari (works on PC too), Firefox 7 and Internet Explorer 9. One of the reasons Chrome is so good is that it updates itself automatically, so you're always using the latest and best.

But the bad news is that your IT department has quite possibly chosen a web browser for you that's well past it's expiry date. If you're especially unfortunate, they also restrict what you can install on your computer, so you can't fix the situation yourself by upgrading your browser.

So what can you do to improve your every-day internet use?
If you're adventurous, you could go ahead and try to download and install one of the browsers above. If you're lucky it'll work. If you're unlucky, it'll be blocked from installing. If that happens, you could contact your IT department and tell them how old your browser is, and can you please have a new one. If you have a good IT department, they'll be happy to oblige.

But they might say no. Possibly they'll remind you that you don't know as much about computers as they do, or mention security threats (modern browser are actually much more secure than older ones). Or maybe they're just plain too busy to help you.

In this situation, if you're using an Internet Explorer older than version 9, there's one last option open to you: install Google Chrome Frame. This is a program that runs Google Chrome inside Internet Explorer, and it gets around some of the installation restrictions you might have. Here's a comparison of Internet Explorer 6, with and without Google Chrome Frame (and real Chrome for good measure).
Click to see the full-size animation

Hope you have a safe and enjoyable internet journey.

Notes for students & other updates

This is a round-up of some stray updates that have gone unmentioned over the last couple of months.

Making notes about students
You can now write notes about students, the same way you do for listings. If it's your job to approve future students, you'll probably find this useful—whenever there's some hold-up with an approval, you can make a note and have it show up next to the student's name in the approval list.

Exporting student data
Now it's possible to export your student data, as well as data for your providers and listings.

Listings with photos rank higher in search results
It's so obvious it's almost not worth saying: photos reveal things about a property that can't be conveyed through words alone. They're so important that, for a while, I think we even considered making them a requirement for new listings. We stopped short of that in favour of rewarding providers who add photos of their listings—their listings will show above non-photographed listings. Just remember though, there are other things that affect rankings, like tags, star ratings and (depending on the search order) recency and distance from campus.

Password assistance
When you click the “Forget your password” link, you get a more helpful message if you try to click the reset link more than once. We also ask people to confirm their new password to catch typos. And we've allowed the < and > symbols in passwords, which were previously preventing some students from signing in.

Closed listings showing up on Google
After listings close, we now ask Google (and other search engines) to forget about them and stop showing them in search results. Providers sometimes include private information about themselves in their listings, and then get surprised later when it shows up in Google searches. While we recommend that you remove any private details if you notice them, if any slip through they won't stick around in Google for too long.

Notes redesign

I've just finished redesigning notes for listings. The goals for this redesign were:

  1. Make notes nicer to use
  2. Show them alongside lists of listings, so that you don't have to click the listing to see the note.

So here's what notes used to look like:

Notes_before


And here's what they look like now:

Notes_after


Here's what they look like on the listings tab:

Notes_in_list


And this is from the admin overview page:

Notes_for_approval

Hope you like the changes!

Using MailChimp to email students and providers

Every now and then, you might like to email the people who have registered on your site to give them news, or ask them to engage in some way—by filling out a survey for example.

You could do this by exporting providers and students into a spreadsheet, extracting all the email addresses and BCC'ing them in a normal email. If you've tried that before, you might have noticed a few problems, like
  1. You get a lot of “bounce-back” emails from email addresses that don't work
  2. You might get spam complaints from some people
  3. You can't really tell who received the email
  4. The email looks a bit boring
This is where using a mail-sending service like MailChimp can really help. It'll help you send nicely formatted emails to all, or some, of the people who have registered on your site. You'll be able to track who received your email, as well as who opened it. And they deal with all the messy email stuff, making sure the emails get sent quickly and reliably.

Here's how to use MailChimp with StudyStays. And if you want to get more familiar with MailChimp, they have a bunch of resources for you to peruse.

Step 1: Set up a MailChimp account
Go to MailChimp and sign up for an account. The “Forever Free” account lets you send up to 12,000 emails a month, and store a list of 2,000 people. This should be more than enough for most people, but if you do eventually outgrow the free plan, it's only about 3 cents per email you send.

01

Step 2: Create a new MailChimp list
Next you need to create a new list of email recipients. It'll be an empty list to begin with—later on StudyStays will add all your students and providers into the list for you.

To create a new list:
  1. Make sure you're logged into MailChimp, then click Lists, and then click the big create list button. It might ask you if you want to create a group instead: tell it that yes, you're really, really sure you want to create a list!
  2. Fill out the form to create your list.
02

Step 3: Enable MailChimp integration in StudyStays
Note: you must be a Super Admin to perform this step.
Before StudyStays can synchronise students and providers with your MailChimp account, you need to tell it your MailChimp “API key”. An API key is a sort of password a website can use to access to your MailChimp account. So make sure you don't tell anyone your API key unless you want them to have access to your account.

To enable MailChimp integration
  1. Make sure you're logged in to your MailChimp account. Go to the Account menu drop-down (top right) and choose API Keys & Authorized Apps.
  2. Click add a key. When the page reloads, you'll see a long string of gibberish under the API Key heading—that's your API key. Copy it to your clipboard with Ctrl-C (Command-C on Mac).

    03

  3. Log in to your Studystays site, and go to Admin > Settings > MailChimp integration (under Advanced settings).
  4. Tick the box to Enable MailChimp integration, then enter you API key. You won't be able to select a list yet, so click save.
  5. When the page reloads, select the list you created in step 2 above. Click save again.
04

Your MailChimp list will be synchronised automatically now, and again every hour. If you're impatient or bored, you can also click the Re-sync now button on the right-hand side of the Admin > Settings > MailChimp integration page.

Step 4: Send an email
Back on the MailChimp site, click Campaigns (top-right), then create campaign, and choose regular ol' campaign.

You'll want to send to the list you created in step 2 above. You can send to the entire list (all students and providers), or just parts of the list: choosing a “segment” will let you send to just students, just real estate agents, providers who registered in the last month, and all sorts of other combinations.

Follow through the 5-step process to create your email campaign. When it comes to choosing a template, you can use the design genius button to get really creative, or another good option is to start from scratch and choose a simple layout.

Once you've created your campaign, you can send a test to yourself, send it immediately, or just save it to send later. You can see all the campaigns you've created by clicking Campaigns at top-right.

Star ratings

An easy way to highlight a listing is to give it a star rating. The more stars a listing has, the higher it will appear in search results.
Made-in-aviary

How to rate a listing
Once you've approved a listing, you'll see some greyed-out stars under the Approval heading on the right-hand side of the page. Click on the stars to give the listing a rating.

Capture

By the way, rating listings is completely optional—and until you rate a listing for the first time, students won't see any stars or have the option to search by stars.

What about tags?
Tags are similar to star rankings because both can be used to affect a listing's position in search results. But unlike a tag which has some meaning associated with it, stars are just a general way to rank listings—there's no need to explain yourself! Feel free to use stars as an alternative to tags, or in combination with them.

Exporting listings

Good news! You can now export all your listing data.

Made-in-aviary

To export listings
  1. Go to the listings tab in admin
  2. Choose the listings you want to export (choose All to export everything)
  3. Click 
    Capture
From there it's up to you what you want to do with the data. You might want to do some number-crunching in a spreadsheet program, create detailed reports, or maybe just keep a snapshot of listings at a point in time.

It works much the same way as exporting provider data, if you're already familiar with that.

Adding forms to your site

We recommend using a website called Wufoo to manage your forms. Wufoo lets you edit your forms really easily, but at the same time it offers some very powerful functions like reporting and even taking payments in a form.

Getting Wufoo forms into your StudyStays site is fairly easy, but requires a few manual steps. We're planning to automate some of this in the future, so it should get easier. Here's how to do it in the meantime.

Read the rest of this post »