Website Update 13/8/22

It’s another site update from us, telling you all about what we’ve been up to with the website over the past few weeks. 😃

Social media

First thing that we have been concentrating on is our social media. There’s a reason that companies hire people specifically to run their social media accounts because to do it properly, takes time, knowledge and a boatload of patience.

Having got our hands on a new system to post out to our social media channels a while ago, we’ve gone ahead and built up a number of posts that we can schedule and have so far managed to schedule posts every week day, up until the end of September.

It’s been a learning curve navigating our way through this new system and understanding how our posts are handled by both it, and by the social platforms as well but we’re now at a point where we have posts going out ever weekday in August and September which is great as September is going to be busy!

We’ve tried to make the posts as interesting as possible and something that you actually want to get in your feed every day and we’d be super interested in hearing what you think about the posts or if you have any suggestions for what you think would be useful to you and others.

Readability and accessibility

We’ve also had another push on on the style of our site, specifically the readability and style of our blog pages. It’s no secret that this site has definitely been a learning experience (we all have to start somewhere!) and sometimes my past experience of creating websites (back in the 1990’s) has actually been more of a hindrance as the new style of websites is much more different than what it was. Our goal is to make the site as professional looking as possible and this also means ensuring that the blog pages are more readable and accessible.

To this end, I’ve updated the last blog post that was posted (What are Parson’s Puzzles?), emphasising key points in bold, which helps with skim reading for those short on time. If you’re a teacher, then you’ll certainly appreciate this!

Sometimes it’s easier to listen to an article while you are doing things around the house and other people might find this beneficial as well in terms of accessibility. So at the top of the Parson Puzzle article, we’ve also included a Listen to this article section that you can play or download in MP3 format while you get on with other things.

Table of Contents (but this isn’t it!)

Also on the blog, and which may appear in some longer pages as well, is a handy dandy, Table of Contents heading with a button next to it. This makes it easy for people to skip between the headings in the article and to get to the content that they want fast.

By clicking on any of these heading you’ll be magically transported to that heading and associated text 😀. It also gives you a brief overview of what’s coming up if that’s what you want to see.

Random styling

We’ve also been working on some other styling with the blog and other parts of the website including changing the font on the blog, to make it more readable, changing the font colour on the courses, again to make it more readable, and sorting out our side bar so the background isn’t transparent.

Overall, the changes we’ve made in my opinion, have made the site look a lot better and these changes are something that we’ll be putting in place for other blog posts and pages for the foreseeable future.

Site notifications

In the final update, we’ve also implemented site wide notifications through the browsers built in notification system. If you click on the Accept button, this will allow us to notify you whenever a new article gets posted or if we put some more content onto the website. This seems a lot more efficient than composing a new email to people every time the site gets an update, or relying on social media services to show you our posts in your feed, among all the pictures of food and pouting!

And finally

If you’ve made it all way down here, thanks a lot! We really hope that you enjoy the site and if you have any questions or comments about what we do please get in touch.

If you’d like to support our effort to provide free computer science education and resources, consider donating to our Ko-fi. This allows us to keep the servers running and helps us invest in tools to make the site better.

Many thanks for your support!