SchoolSeek? - Independent Website to help you find a private school for your child

Big Changes at SchoolSeek

Well, the regular visitors amongst you may have noticed some big changes around the site recently. We’ve been laughing at the idea of sleep for the past few days and added several cool new features, as well as streamlining some old ones.

This post is probably indicative of the most substantial change to the site. We’ve gone all Web 2.0 and put a blog on the site. The aim of the blog is to become a major resource for education related information, obviously with a focus on Australian issues such as changes in education policy, interesting programs offered by various schools etc.

We’ve also been at work on some site design changes. Most of the work has been relatively subtle, aimed at making the site more accessible and more user friendly.

Upcoming Features

A sneak at some of the new things that we’ve been working on:

• Subscription levels to allow schools to edit their own information,
• Mapping and travel information,
• A massive addition to the database, raising the number of schools to well over 2,000!
• Changes to the “Compare School” feature to allow you to compare up to 5 schools,
• Improvements to the search functionality, to make it easier to “find the right school for your child!”,

We’re also going to add the ability to add comments, so we’ll be able to get your feedback to blog posts like this one. Once it’s ready to go, let us know how we’re doing.

July Website Statistics

During July 2006 the site had over 121,000 hits and whilst about 73 % of these were from Australia, we also had hits from the UK, USA, Mexico, Netherlands, Hungary, China, Korea, France and many others. Of interest this month is the length of time users are spending on the site – people are not just visiting quickly but are spending considerable time searching through to find the right school for their child – in fact 29.5 % of visitors spent more than 5 minutes more than 800 people spending longer than 15 minutes ( as well as many repeat visitors ). By far the most popular page is the advanced search where users can select various search criteria to find the school that best suits them – in total, users viewed over 41,000 pages during July. Google, AskJeeves, Yahoo and NineMSN have also now indexed the site and so it is quickly becoming the easiest and most common web tool for locating the right school for your child.