Website update 16/6/22

Phew 🥵! It’s been hot today, much like our red hot website updates which I’m going to tell you about.

Today has been about completing little things that actually make a big difference to the site and the user experience.

First up – we’ve enabled on screen notifications when a user gets some iMedia points. This is a great way to give users some visual feedback and get them excited about earning some points. I’m not entirely sure why this wasn’t enabled to begin with, but no problem, it is now!

Speaking of iMedia points, one of the tasks this week was to enable users to gain points when they completed a course. This has now been added in and when you complete a course you can now earn a whopping 20 points! So by putting the time in on the courses you can earn a lot of points.

While we’re on the subject of finishing courses another of the tasks this week was to design and add certificates, so when you completed a course, you earned a certificate. Well this has now been completed as well. When you complete a course you get a nice little certificate to go along with it.

Testing has also been done on all of the courses to ensure that everything works correctly and that users can retake quizzes and courses if they want to. We’ve also ensured that questions are correct and users are given proper explanations when they look back through the quizzes which makes a big difference if users get a question wrong and they can’t figure out why.

As you can see, the user experience for doing and completing courses is now a lot better and users are getting rewarded handsomely for the time they put into learning.

In other news, we’ve finally been given the ‘Google seal of approval’ to have adverts put onto the site. It’s actually taken a really long time to get the site up to a good enough standard to be able to be approved as not every site does get approved for their Adsense program. Stop hissing back there! I know, I know, let me explain the reasoning behind adding the adverts.

I’d really like to run the site by getting donations to cover most of the costs for hosting and buying the plugins we need to make the site awesome. Unfortunately, even before this massive economic down turn, most people don’t want to contribute to a random website that offers free resources (who would right?!). My only options are therefor to take a personal monetary hit every month for the greater good (which I do, don’t get me wrong) or to add adverts onto the site to try and recoup a small percentage of the time and money I invest into the site. If I did get enough donations I would turn adverts off, no problem.

There’s lots more I could write to try and justify why, but at the end of the day – this site needs money to keep going and at the moment, this is the best way that I can think of to do that.

This week has been really focussed on getting the site back up to scratch and hopefully makes it a lot better experience for the people who are using it. There’s still lots to do to get the resources ready for new specification J834 starting in September. While work on this has been started, it’s not something that will be able to get done this week. We’re aiming for the R093 courses to be fully complete by September and the course start date and we should be releasing them as they get done. Keep your eyes on our social media page for announcements on when these are complete or sign up for our newsletter.

Once again, many thanks for reading and your support.