StudyStays Blog

New report: Listings per month

This new report lets you check how many advertisements have been listed each month since your site was launched.

You can find the new report under Admin > Reports > Listings per month.

Mobile Friendly

I'm pleased to announce that StudyStays now works a lot better on phones and other mobile devices.

We've done this by making StudyStays adapt to small screens. When you access a StudyStays site on a mobile device, you're still loading the same page that you would on a desktop computer, but visual elements are condensed and re-formatted to make the most of limited screen space. You can see how it works on a desktop computer by resizing the browser window—you'll see the layout change as you drag the window in smaller. Try it out!

For this update we focused on public and student-specific areas of the site. This is stage one of our mobile plan—we'll be looking at mobile-improvements for landlords next.

Mobile will be a high priority for us going forward. In the last 10 months we've seen a 30% increase in mobile visits, and mobile now makes up about 12% of all visits to StudyStays sites.

I'd like to say a big “thanks” to Pete for working on this update!

Improvements to content management

We now have a brilliant new content editor for StudyStays. This replaces the old editor used on content pages and other places that require a bit more than just plain text.

Not only does the new editor look nicer, it also sports some great new features

Image uploads
Document attachments (such as PDFs)
Tables
Text colours
Video embedding (no upload support, yet)

You can try it out by editing a content page, FAQ, or campus description and any other part of StudyStays that supports word processor-like editing.

Also, I've moved the links to edit the front page message and sidebar to the Content tab in Admin—in case you're wondering where they've gone. There's also a new link on the Content tab to manage the images and files you've already uploaded—this is mainly useful if you've uploaded something and need to remove it.

Hope you like it!

Website redesign

I'm pretty excited to show off our newly redesigned website, which we launched over the weekend.

The redesign was done by a good friend, Peter Chappell of Experience Bureau. As well as looking a lot nicer, the new site also adapts to suit mobile devices. Peter's going to be helping to make StudyStays work better on mobile phones too, with the new mobile version that's in the works.

New: allowing landlords to change approved listings

This new feature is an improvement in the way we let landlords change their listings after they've been approved.

The goal has always been to let landlords modify their current listings, but we also want admins to be able to screen listings. And we don't want to have to take listings offline while admins review changes. At the moment we have a slightly messy compromise—where providers can edit some 'safe' parts of the listing, but other parts are locked and require an email or phone call to the university to request changes.

This can be confusing and frustrating for landlords, and cause extra administration work. In some cases, it leads landlords to take matters into their own hands and just create a new listing with the correct details.

The new feature will resolve these problems. It puts providers 'in charge' of their listing, but at the same time it gives admins even more control over screening. Students will always only see the last approved version of each listing.

How it works

Landlords will be able to click a new 'Make changes' button on their listing. From there, they'll be able to change any part of their listing including the address and details which were previously locked. Saving these changes, they'll see the new version of their listing, with a note that their changes still need to be reviewed.

The changes are stored in the background until they've been reviewed by an admin. So at this point, students will still see the last approved version of the listing.

On the admin overview tab, an item will appear to say that some changes need to be reviewed. Clicking this item shows the listing with the changes highlighted, with options to either accept or decline the changes.

Clicking 'accept' will pull the landlord's changes out of the background and include them in the public listing. 'Decline' will make the changes disappear. There's an option to notify the landlord of either decision as usual.

Recent updates to photos, contact details + more

Photo upload improvements

I've updated listing photos to support drag-and-drop and re-ordering. Also the icons for uploaded photos are no longer microscopic!

Preventing contact details in public listings

StudyStays will only reveal a landlord's contact details to students who are registered and signed in. This helps protect landlords' privacy and helps ensure your university's students get the most benefit from your service.

Up until now, landlords could potentially sidestep this by including contact details directly in their listing. This update is designed to stop that happening.

Converting providers to students

It's a fairly common mistake for students to accidentally register as providers. Now you can take care of these students by editing their provider account in admin and clicking 'convert to student'.

More to come

There's a bigger update on the way that deserves it's own blog post. Coming soon!

Recent updates: faster pages, checklists, and bond limits

Faster pages

You might have noticed admin pages loading faster in the last couple of weeks. The best example is the “Listings” page, which loads about 12x faster now.

Also speedier now: data export times. For StudyStays sites that have been around long enough to accumulate lots of listings, data exports were taking around 2 ½ minutes. Exporting probably isn't something you'd do too often, but waiting that long still sucks. So I managed to chop export times in these cases by at least half.

Checklists

Remember those multiple-choice categories that used to look something like this?

They're now displayed as checklists instead, e.g.

Hopefully this makes it clearer that you can choose one or more items, or none. So you can say goodbye to any hints you had to add about how to “hold Ctrl (or Command) and click to select multiple options”. Whew!

Rental bond limits

StudyStays has supported setting a maximum bond based on weekly rent for a while now. But it seems that some tenancy authorities like to make exceptions to their maximum bond rules. Maybe it’s an effort to make renting as easy to understand as our tax system? If you can tell me, I'd be interested to know!

Anyway, if you would like to add a higher maximum bond for rentals over a certain amount, it's now possible to do that through Admin > Settings > Listings.

Providers will see an error if they go over the specified limits:

... or...

If you don't need or want this extra functionality, you're free to use just a single bond limit, or none at all.

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

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:

Sign in as an administrator, and go to your dashboard by clicking your email address at top-right
Click the “Edit my administrator details” link to edit your details
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):

Follow the steps above for enabling notifications, but obviously you'll un-tick the box so you won't receive notifications
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.

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:

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.
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.