Blog

I just launched a refresh of the studystays. com. au <http://studystays. com. au/> promotional website, with a new look and a new logo. The design is by my friend Deena <http://deenamusic. com/>. Deena worked part-time at StudyStays last year on marketing, promotional material, and this website.

There are 4 parts of the front page content that you can customise: 1. Student and provider titles 2. Student and provider "blurbs" 3. Front page content 4. The side bar To customise the first three, go to Admin > Content > Front page. *1.

These improvements should make it easier for advertisers to list the correct address for their property. There are two parts to the change. *Address autocompletion when adding a new listing* There's a new page for adding listings, with a few quick questions to help advertisers get started quickly.

You might find this update useful for those times when your listing approval queue starts getting long. You now have the option to automatically email providers after their listing has been in the queue for a while. The setting to enable this is under *Admin > Settings > Email Templates > "Send an email while listings are in the approval queue".

This is just a minor improvement, but now when providers list units, apartments or flats, the listing form will now check to make sure they entered the unit/flat/apartment number.

If you're taking a break from approving listings over the holidays, we've added a new way give yourselves a bit of breathing room. You can now configure an email to be sent out after providers add a listing. In this email you might like to let people know that you might take longer than usual to process their listing.

Bulletins are a new way to display important messages to students or providers after they've signed in. As a StudyStays administrator, you can post Bulletins from Admin > Content > Bulletins. You can specify a target audience to display to (students or providers) and a title and message for the Bulletin.

StudyStays now automatically adjusts letter case where it looks like people have entered all upper- or lower-case text, or haven't capitalised the first words in their sentences for listing details. We hope this will give listings’ text more consistency, without admins needing to make as many manual adjustments.

StudyStays has just started asking students whether they're international students when they register. Although it's been a goal to keep the student registration form as short and sweet as possible to encourage student registrations, a number of universities have said that international student status would be very useful for reporting purposes.

*Min-max lease* Up until now, accommodation providers have only been able to enter a single value for the lease duration.

I'm pleased to announce that StudyStays now supports sign-ups <http://studystays.com.au/try> from New Zealand universities. This means that NZ unis can use a studystays.co.nz <http://studystays.co.nz> sub-domain for their trial website, map searches will look for NZ addresses, and other smaller things like asking for NZBNs rather than ABNs.

You can now feature listings on the front page of your StudyStays site by awarding the special 'featured' badge to listings. This allows you to promote listings that deserve special attention. To use Featured Listings you might need to check that you have Badges <http://www. studystays. com. au/help/badges> enabled first.

This update only applies to universities that choose to expire future student accounts after a certain time period. If you're not sure whether you expire student accounts or not, you can find the setting under Admin > Settings > Student approvals. With this update, StudyStays now retains more data about students after their account expires.

Here's a list of small improvements and additions over the last few months. *Map region indicator for listings with a hidden address * Instead of showing a marker icon on the street, these are now shown with a pink circle indicating the general area of the listing.

Up until now there's been the concept of a blacklist, where providers were automatically flagged once they have one of their listings rejected. I think it's fair to say that the automatic and apparently-harsh nature of the blacklist has caused some concern and confusion, and it's time for a redesign.

As you probably know, impersonating a provider lets you see your StudyStays website they way the provider sees it. Previously you had to sign out and in again to get back to admin after impersonating someone. I've just added a small button that makes it much easier to stop impersonating and switch back to admin.

The new Mailouts feature in StudyStays lets you send mass emails to students and providers. Up until now I've recommended Mailchimp <http://blog. studystays. com/using-mailchimp-to-email-students-and-provide> for this sort of thing, but some larger universities have surpassed the free usage limits for Mailchimp now.

Going by the number of requests, I think you might find this a useful enhancement to the change-review <http://blog. studystays. com/new-allowing-landlords-to-change-approved-lis> feature—just in time for the next student intake. Up until now, when a landlord submitted changes to their listing you could choose to accept or decline them.

We've made some changes to the layout of searches and listings in a recent update. Searches now show the primary listing photo if there is one. If providers have uploaded several photos, they can choose the primary one by dragging it to the top of the list of photos when they're editing the listing.

This new report lets you check how many advertisements have been listed each month since your site was launched. You can find the new report under Admin > Reports > Listings per month.

I'm pleased to announce that StudyStays now works a lot better on phones and other mobile devices. We've done this by making StudyStays adapt to small screens.

We now have a brilliant new content editor for StudyStays. This replaces the old editor used on content pages and other places that require a bit more than just plain text.

I'm pretty excited to show off our newly redesigned website <http://studystays. com/>, which we launched over the weekend. The redesign was done by a good friend, Peter Chappell of Experience Bureau <http://www. experiencebureau. com/>. As well as looking a lot nicer, the new site also adapts to suit mobile devices.

This new feature is an improvement in the way we let landlords change their listings after they've been approved. The goal has always been to let landlords modify their current listings, but we also want admins to be able to screen listings. And we don't want to have to take listings offline while admins review changes.

*Photo upload improvements*I've updated listing photos to support drag-and-drop and re-ordering. Also the icons for uploaded photos are no longer microscopic! *Preventing contact details in public listings* StudyStays will only reveal a landlord's contact details to students who are registered and signed in.