Navigation for Wise Scout - A blog about our online adventures while creating our job board - August, 2007

It has been a busy time for the site, still more work to do on speed improvements, through lots of analysis our page delays (at least 2 secs of them) are caused by our location/mapping link so we need to do some work on reducing that. While working on that we are also implementing our map of jobs feature so that all of the user's searches can be displayed on a map with drill through capability.

A few statistics for the last 2 weeks:
- 299 site visitors
- 1030 page views
- 5:58 average time on the site
- 49% of all visits are typing the url in (or from their favourites)
- 14% are coming from Ecademy clicks

We are pretty pleased with that, obviously the more visitors the better and we have spent a grand total of £30 on advertising so far (which will only really help us with search traffic).

We are just testing an new little addition to the login so it will remember your username, nothing life changing but it was a request we received.

We now have passed the 35000 job mark and are looking at how we get up to 50000 over the next couple of weeks.

A week since launch and we are ready to roll out some changes to the site:

- page loading dramatically reduced with lots of compression wizardry

- improved search facility that is both quicker and more accurate

- email issues resolved so job alerts should find their way through the more spam sensitive sites

We are now working on our next set of features and adding more job sources to our job search to work up towards 30000 jobs a day on the site.

Tried a few forums to get a few more eyes on the site and hopefully be able to convert a few more people into signups, got a few responses and one even posted an error we had with some of our search results (it was showing a few salaried jobs rather than pure contract jobs) which was great news and that we have hopefully fixed now. Note the word hopefully as we are never 100% sure that we can catch all the permutations of rates but are actively working on making it better. More details on the search progress to come.

After a quick email to a few people I know in IT we pushed our little project out into the world. Thanks to those who tried it pretty much straight away and were quick to tell us we had a few problems with our registration process. Firstly we would have intermittent failures with our emailing sending resulting in a nasty yellow screen of death, the second is that certain hosts appear to be treating our mail as SPAM particularly Hotmail. As a short term fix we have modified the registration process to offer a one step register and sign in, hopefully that won't impact us in the long term but does create a bit more risk that people may not have correct email addresses and therefore may not receive our alert emails but it is a risk we have to take.