In recent times our plans for the site have been hampered by problems with our hosting. Without boring you with technicalities it meant the site was slow (making changes laborious) and big changes were risky (as we didn’t have quick access to staging sites and backups).
We’ve finally been able to change hosts and hopefully you’re already seeing the benefits in the site speed. I know some of you were having problems with logging in which seemed to be down to the ReCaptcha timing out. This appears to have been fixed by the better speed, thankfully.
My first project has been to try and make it easier for you to find your listings, see information about them, edit and renew them, and reverify them when renewal has been missed.
So, what’s changed?
Firstly, the rather complicated section at the bottom of the listing which aimed to guide you through registering, logging in, claiming, editing and renewing is gone. Instead you’ll see one of three buttons near the top of a listing.
As before, the Claim Listing button will open a form popup requesting details of your relationship to the rescue. The form has been tweaked to remove some of the default, non-applicable information.
Clicking the other two options will both take you to our new ‘hub’.
The hub is the second change we’ve made. This page aims to contain everything you need to manage your listings and is divided into six tabs.
The first tab is ‘My Listings’. It will show you the listings associated with your account and the key information you need about them like their status, what section they’re in, whether they’re verified, when they expire, and when they were last edited and by whom. Buttons will allow you to Edit and Renew the listing and there’s a new option – Review. Now, clicking Renew or Review will open a simpler pop up which shows you the current information on your listing and invites you to confirm it’s right. That will move the listing’s expiry date on 6 months and apply the ‘Owner Verified’ banner if it’s not already present. If changes are needed you can use the Edit button to make them as usual but hopefully this makes simply confirming the details are correct much quicker.
The second tab is ‘My Account’ which allows you to manage your user account.
Tab three is ‘Site News’. This gives us a place to write posts like this letting you know about changes to the site.
The fourth tab is the new home for guidance on listing management. The content has had a refresh to reflect the changes we’ve made. At the bottom you’ll find a new form which you can use to request that a listing is moved to another section, removed from the site, or reinstated from being Expired or Closed.
Tab five is the new home of our Rescuer FAQs which have also had a refresh.
And the final tab is Rescue Resources where you’ll find a small collection of things we think might be useful.
A couple of smaller changes as well. When choosing a category for your listing you now also have the choice of ‘Collective’ and ‘Advice Group’. We’ve added these to reflect some of the newer types of rescue which have developed in recent years. You’ll also find some changes to the menu in the ‘Rescue Zone’ to account for all of the above. And finally, we’ve updated the listing management emails you receive to direct you to the hub by default.
We hope these changes will make managing your listing clearer and quicker. If you have any feedback or questions, please do get in touch via directory@helpwildlife.co.uk