We’re excited to announce that we are relaunching the TechBoomers website on the night of Wednesday, February 21st! But TechBoomers is so amazing – why change it? We thought you might ask. There are a few reasons we considered revamping the site to give it a fresh new look, and some great new features.
Why relaunch?
Our original website was built as an eLearning platform, aiming to provide eager learners and digital literacy teachers with free courses to help improve their lives with technology. Whether you were brand new to technology, were looking to learn more about specific topics, or had a classroom full of people you needed to teach – TechBoomers had something for you.
Though our tutorials and courses have helped many people, over the years, we came to realize that very few of our users were actually taking our courses in full. Most of our visitors were looking to solve one-time problems, looking for answers to many “how to” questions they were posing to search engines like Google. While answering people’s inquiries one at a time wasn’t the initial vision, and isn’t the traditional approach to digital literacy, we came to learn how big of an impact providing well-written and up-to-date articles and tutorials can be to our visitors.
We’re going from this:
To this:
Our aim has always been to provide the best quality information to help teach various aspects of digital literacy, and make sure we do our best to answer the questions our users are asking themselves every day. Writing more specific articles to answer questions like this was very useful method to bringing more users to our websites.
However, we’ve known for a while that the one-time searchers that come to our site don’t often stick around, even though we had many other related articles they would be interested in. When we started to ask ourselves why this was, we realized how beneficial it would be for our visitors if we could find ways to get them excited about other topics they wanted to learn about.
What we decided to do
It became clear that changes to the general layout of the site would help people learn even more then they set out to. However, changing wasn’t quite so simple for us. Our new website is powered by WordPress, but because our old website wasn’t, in order to showcase related content in an easy way for our visitors, we would have to write a lot of code from scratch. Over our time working on the TechBoomers website, we ran into many other challenges having to write code from scratch. WordPress on the other hand has access to thousands of plugins – no coding required! We could move all of our great existing content over to our new WordPress-powered site without losing any of our tutorials and articles, and much faster than needing to re-do everything from scratch.
The only downside was that we would lose our user accounts, and the course-tracking feature TechBoomers had. Though some of our users loved this feature, we knew what we would be gaining would help our users even more! We thought about this trade-off for weeks and weeks, and decided to get feedback from our partners. Once we had their support, we decided to go ahead with the change and move over to WordPress.
To help make it easy for our loyal users, we have made sure that even though the course-tracking feature is gone, all 100+ courses we have on our site are still 100% accessible, and set up on very similar pages, so working through them will still be just as easy – you simply won’t need to log in and track your progress.
We also made sure to add some new features, including easier ways to find related courses and articles, and will be featuring our newest content in fun new ways, so it’s easier to find. We’ll also be showing off some of our all-time best content so you can learn more about the articles that have helped many others.
What we’re hoping to achieve
Our number one priority is always to help our users get the information they want, and learn more about digital literacy. If our content helps our users learn more, and improve their lives with the knowledge they gained from our site – then we’ve done our job; but to do that, we have to pay the bills to.
TechBoomers has always been, and will always be free to use! We also hope to provide our content without any invasive advertising bothering you as you learn. To do this, we generate our revenue in other ways, which is achieved by getting the users directed to us from search engines to stay on our site longer. The best way to keep our website running smoothly is to get more people drawn there to stay on it, so we’re hoping these updates will help with our user engagement, and help keep more people on the website for longer periods of time.
Our users will hopefully find more related articles and ideas to explore, allowing us to keep growing our usership and traffic, and continue to grow our website. We’re hoping these changes will help us grow our hardworking team as well, so we can create even more articles, courses, and videos for our users!
What you can do
Here are a few things you can do to help us with our re-launch:
- Share our re-launch through your social media channels, including this post, or our new homepage once the site goes live.
- If you run your own website, blog, resources page, or have a digital literacy information page, please add our website’s link to your page!
- As always, we would love any feedback you have (good or bad) about our new website. With any relaunch, there are bound to be bugs and issues here and there, so please let us know if you come across anything that isn’t quite working the way you think it should. Please report any bugs or website issues to contact@techboomers.com.
- Next Tuesday, we’ll be releasing a video tour of the new website on our YouTube channel that you can watch, and it will show you the ropes of the new site’s features, and point out any major changes and ways the new site differs from the old site. We hope you find it easy to navigate – so don’t be afraid to reach out and let us know what you think.
As always, your learning is our first priority! Thanks for sticking with us during this time, and we hope you enjoy the new site as much as we do!
