Thank you for your feedback.
Over the past few months, we’ve asked you to fill in a couple of surveys – one about the website, and one about the courses we’ve offered.
You’ve all come up trumps. Well, not all of you, but many of you – dozens of you. So, thank you for taking the time to do that – we really appreciate it, in particular because the surveys weren’t short, and it did take time to fill them in.
I do need something else specific from you – which I’ll get to shortly… (read on!)
We’ve already taken note of what you’ve said, and started work to implement your thoughts.
Key points which came across strongly were:
- The Forum is very popular, and widely used – either as a Forum, or via the digest emails, which many of you said you read and valued.
- People have experienced issues with logging in, or with knowing if they’re logged in.
- The visual style of the website is great! For a website of 15 years ago. But now, it could do with a refresh, to make it look more modern, more appealing and cleaner.
We’ve already started work on these things. David, our IT man, has done lots of work behind the scenes on ensuring that the login process is smoother, and works better across both the website and Forum. Now, for example, when you log in, you stay where you are, rather than being re-directed automatically elsewhere (often to the Forum pages). And, partly as an attempt to keep the website appealing, with fresh content – we now have a blog! (Yes, this is it – you’re reading it!)
He’s also made a significant change to make the website “responsive” – meaning that it now works on mobile phones and other such devices, rather than just on desktop computers.
Finally, we’ve now made it possible for both members and non-members to book places on our courses via the website, which was another big request that came across strongly from the survey. We did that just in time for all our courses to be cancelled, which was great.
For the near-to-medium term future, we’re also looking at other significant changes, including a visual re-design to refresh the whole site, and changing how the site is hosted in order to make it quicker to load.
(I’m still getting to that point where I need something from you…)
There were lots of other specific suggestions we had, and some interesting results to the questions about what the site is for, and which pages it should feature.
Some questions showed a broad spectrum of responses, for example about whether the website should attempt to generate a source of income for the SFTG:
Slightly more negative than positive perhaps, but no real agreement.
On the other hand, some questions produced almost unanimous feedback – such as that the website should include a “directory of expertise”:
Here comes my request for your help.
It’s clear that our membership – at least those who responded to our survey – would like to be able to turn to each other and ask for help.
How do I grow this?
Should my chicken really look like this?
What’s the best way to…?
So…. what’s your area of expertise? Are you great at rheas? Have you battled with stock fencing and now know all (or most) there is to know? Could we turn to you for help with greenhouse growing?
If we’re going to put together a directory of expertise, in other words, that’s down to you.
So, please email me at gto@sftg.co.uk to tell me if you don’t mind me putting a little bit about you and your area of expertise on the website for our members. The feedback was that this would only be for members, so the information won’t be out on the web for all the world to see. It’s up to you how you ask people to get in touch – phone or email, the choice is yours.
Thank you.
For those of you who’d like to download and view the entire (anonymised) set of results, click the link below:
