StudyStays Blog

More room details for shared listings

Shared listings now provide space for advertisers to specify details about individual rooms for rent.

Previously, an advertiser could only list the room types available. Now, each room can be listed with different rent, bond, availability date, furnishings and bathroom.

This will allow us to give students more targeted search options when they are looking for a share house. It will also allow us to do student better matching for a new "Find a Flatmate" add-on which is currently under construction.

Rental (whole property) listings will not be affected by this change.

All existing shared listings have been automatically updated to support the new functionality. We have attempted to set furnishings based on your existing categories, but where this was not possible rooms will show unfurnished as the default. All rooms have been set to "Shared bathroom" as the default. Advertisers can manually make changes to their listings if they want to show furnishings or private bathrooms. All new shared listings will require advertisers to enter these details up front.

There are a couple of configuration changes you might like to make through admin.

Firstly, if you have room types (Admin > Settings > Room Types) that include a bathroom type, these can be removed. For example, "Single with Ensuite" could be removed, which will give you the option to replace it with just "Single".

Secondly, categories that contain information about furnishings for rooms, the entire category could be removed.

If you have any questions, please contact support@studystays.com.


Quick Shortlist

There is now a quicker way for students to shortlist ads from search results. A star appears when hovering the mouse over a listing in search results, and clicking this will shortlist the listing.

This saves students having to click through to each listing that they want to shortlist. It also provides a reminder when they have already shortlisted a listing in an earlier search.


Map Directions to Campus

Note: This new functionality requires first upgrading to the New Look for StudyStays. Please contact support@studystays.com if you'd like to upgrade.

Listing maps now include a new way to quickly look up directions to a campus.

Hovering or clicking (or tapping on mobile) on a campus in the listing map will load a route and approximate driving time to the campus.

For listings that are within 1 kilometre of a campus, walking directions will be shown instead.

Does this keep addresses private?

As you're probably aware, some listings don't show the exact address; either because the admin settings require it, or the provider has chosen to keep their address private, or the user is not registered as a student.

In these cases, the blue line showing the route to campus begins just within the red circle showing the approximate location of the listing. The travel time shown is still the approximate travel time for the entire route.

More map tweaks

Initially with the New Look, maps would all display at the same zoom level. This zoom level would often not show a campus. Now maps are automatically zoomed to the level that will show the nearest campus, while still keeping the map centred on the listing.

Arrows for campus markers are now displayed at the top of the marker instead of the bottom. This allows the marker text to expand downwards to show directions without changing the location pointed to.

A New Year, and a New Content Editor

Content editing in StudyStays has been upgraded to use a newer, more powerful editor. Just in time for the new year!

The content editor is used by admins to format text in Pages, Frequently Asked Questions, Campuses, Mail-outs, Form hints, tag descriptions and in various other places.

The old editor was great for it's time, but the rapid pace of web browser improvement meant some features no longer worked well (or at all) in recent web browsers.

In contrast, the new editor enables many more editing features, including things like:

  • Tables
  • Image alignment and captions
  • Embedding web page previews (great for Social Media like Facebook and Instagram)
  • More reliable pasting from Word documents

... and many more useful features (as you can see from the extra toolbar buttons below).

We hope you enjoy the new editing experience in StudyStays, and have a Happy New Year!


Improving Search Filtering

Please note: the changes in this blog post will only be visible on sites that have been upgraded to the New Look. If your site hasn't been upgraded yet and you'd like to upgrade, please email support@studystays.com.

Some time was spent over the last week looking at how to improve the search experience for students.

The feedback received was that students often jump into a basic search from the front page and end up with many pages of results which they were then having to go through manually. It wasn't clear to students that they could use the "Rooms" and "Properties" links to access the full array of search options to narrow their search.

Based on this feedback, there have been a number of subtle improvements made to the way search works.
  • Narrowing the search: There is now a "Refine search..." link at the top of the search page which will take students back to the full search form. Moving between the search form and back to "Refine search" will keep all their current search criteria.
  • Widening the search: Search facets (e.g. "near Hobart", "for up to $600/week") are now highlighted with grey labels and they can be removed from the search screen without having to go back and redo the search, by clicking the little cross next to each facet.

Before

After

I hope you find these improvements beneficial.