More Updates, Fixes and Bug Swatting

photo-1472806426350-603610d85659You may have noticed the Compare Driving HQ been a bit quiet of late. After frantically trying to solve an issue with our domain name (which in turn caused us issues with our search, the backbone of our website!), we took a deep breath and knuckled down to put our latest fixes and updates into action. Most of these improvements are subtle but make the website much nicer to use.

  • Search results now look much more user-friendly with visible logos! This means instructors/schools can now upload their own logo and stand out in the results. As this is a new feature, almost everyone has the default Compare Driving logo at the moment… so if you are a driving instructor, this is your chance to get ahead of the competition! Find your school to add your logo.
  • We’ve completely redesigned school profile pages, adding the ability for schools to upload their logos and banner image. If you’ve already claimed your account, head over to your page to test the new features! If you haven’t claimed your account, now is a great time to do so.
  • The join process is now streamlined for schools/instructors. Fitter, happier. More productive. Well, mainly just simpler. (These improvements were based on your feedback, so thank you!)
  • We’ve added the ability for students to rate schools and leave comments. Who did you learn to drive with? Find them and leave them a rating or a review. Be polite but be honest – Compare Driving is about finding the best instructors, so your opinions are important.
  • We’ve tidied up some of the text errors on the website, such as aberrant pound signs.  Aberrant pound signs are the worst.
  • The website now uses an SSL certificate, meaning all your information is now encrypted and you can rest easy at night.
  • We fixed the ‘2’ car map bug. We had a small bug where clusters of schools in the same area wouldn’t appear as a car icon, but as a number. We’ve squashed that bug good and proper.

That’s all for now, but we’ve got more things up our sleeve over the next few weeks. For now, please tell your friends about this website and encourage them to give us feedback. Drive safe!

 

Feature Your Driving School on Compare Driving Today – For Free!

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Are you a driving instructor looking to give yourself an edge over the competition? With Compare Driving, you’ll gain access to a host of tools to grow your online presence and connect to new students. And it’s all free!

Ready to Join? Read on…

We’ve made joining Compare Driving as simple as possible.

On the homepage, you can see whether Compare Driving already lists your school by selecting your city.

  • Found your school? Hit “Claim”—you’ll have a chance to ensure the details we hold on you are accurate and up-to-date.
  • School missing? You can add it using the Submit Your Listing form, found on the Compare Driving homepage. We ask for a minimum of: your school name, postcode, cost per lesson and email address.

Whether you’re claiming or adding your school, your listing will be updated within 24 hours.

Not based in one of our starter cities? Compare Driving has been rolled Bristol, Bath, Cardiff, Newport and Swindon, with other major UK cities to follow. If you don’t see your city listed, don’t despair: you can still submit your driving school listing using the Submit Your Listing form. We’ll keep your submission safe and notify you once we add your city.

Happy New Year! Happy New Features!

photo-1445954754112-b737e7c78edcHappy New Year from the Compare Driving Team! We’ve been working hard to add new functionality and features for 2016:

  • We’ve redesigned individual city pages to make them look more attractive, and given the homepage a splash of colour with some gorgeous photographs of Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and others.
  • We’ve added the fine cities of Newport and Swindon to our directory.
  • We’ve made sharing on social media easier with the inclusion of social media buttons across blog posts.
  • We’ve made it possible for driving schools to add logos and images to their pages.

What’s Next?

We’re currently working on adding functionality to the search to allow for filters, allowing you to further define what you’re after in a driving instructor. Our upcoming filters include gender (of instructor), automatic/manual cards and whether or not the school offer intensive courses. In the future, we intend to offer more filters, including those who specialise in nervous drivers/special needs, those that offer motorway lessons and language filters.

Which kinds of filters would be most useful to you? Send us a message!

We’ve seen a huge boost in traffic over Christmas and the New Year, so if you find Compare Driving useful, please tell your friends so we can keep up the momentum. Drive safe!

Autumn Update: Initial Feedback, Cardiff and Illustrators Wanted

Compare Driving LessonsAutumn is finally here! It’s been a busy month or two for us with the impending launch of another mystery website, but we’ve also been working hard on improving Compare Driving. Here’s what we’ve been up to.

Initial Feedback

We recently sent a newsletter out to our Bristol & Bath schools and had some really awesome feedback. Cheers, everyone – it’s given us loads of ideas on how to improve the website! By the way, if you’re a driving school or instructor in the Bristol & Bath area and still haven’t claimed your listing, be sure to do so here. You’ll be the first to gain access to our new features, including our shiny booking system.

We <3 Cardiff

Annigonol ydy un iaith! We’ve recently started adding Cardiff and surrounding area driving schools. We’ve still got a way to go (you might say there’s more than a few!), so if you’re a driving instructor in or near Cardiff and you’ve noticed you’re not yet listed, help us help you by adding your listing here. Diolch!

Followed Us? Now ‘Like’ Us

Twitter not your thang? You can now follow our updates on Facebook.

Illustrators, We Need Your Help

We’re looking for someone with a creative eye to do some illustrative design for the website. We can’t promise hard cash, but we might be able to do some kind of skills swap, as we’ve got a whole bag of skills between us. Failing that, maybe we can buy you a pint or three. Interested? Tweet us.

Compare Driving Launch – We’re Live!

Compare Driving LessonsWe’re pleased to announce the launch of Compare Driving Beta, the first project from Devs Assemble.

So what’s the story? In short, although we learned to drive with some fantastic driving instructors, we all found the entire process of finding and booking driving lessons inadequate. The fumbling around with money every week; the phone calls back and forth; the lack of clarity about how individual instructors compared to others. Compare Driving was born from these frustrations.

Our aim is to help new learners connect with affordable, quality driving instructors in their local area. If you’re a student and haven’t yet found your perfect instructor, our directory will make finding a local, competitively-priced instructor a breeze. Driving instructors and schools will benefit from being able to claim their listing on the website, increasing exposure to potential students in their local area.

Although we currently cover only the Bristol and Bath areas, we’re keen to expand. If you’re a student and think your city should be be next, tweet us and let us know! If you’re an instructor, you can still submit a listing even if you aren’t in Bristol or Bath—once we add your local area, you’ll automatically be added. Easy, right?

We have some fantastic ideas about how we’re going to revolutionise the learning-to-drive journey from beginning to end. We’ll be giving you a sneak peek of our plans here on our blog in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out and be sure to send us your feedback and comments by emailing or tweeting us.

Drive safe!

Introducing Devs Assemble

Welcome! We’re Devs Assemble.

By day, we’re designers, developers and dabblers at a digital agency. By night, we assemble (duh) and use our diverse abilities to work on projects of our own, honing our skills and hopefully scoring a few wins along the way.

Devs Assemble formed after one of our many trips to Bristol’s fine drinking establishments. Like many groups of slightly inebriated folk, we believed we had enough good ideas to impress a hoard of Dragon’s Den investors. Unlike most groups, however, we realised we had an edge: between us, we had the skills to make some of these ideas actually come to fruition.

Although the content of our projects varies tremendously, we use the same approach. We seek problems (there are problems everywhere). When we’ve found an interesting one, we get together to create a solution, be it a website, app or—occasionally—something else entirely. Then we test, try and learn. When our solutions aren’t original, we make sure they’re better. AltaVista and Yahoo! were search engines before Google, but that didn’t stop Larry Page and Sergey Brin coming out with the best solution of all.

Not that we’re as epic as Google, of course. We’re just a group of friends creating for fun, and we know many of our projects will never get off the ground or simply fail. But we hope you’ll join us on our adventures to have a stab at some cool stuff. We’ll be documenting our successes (and flops!) along the way on our blog, so stick around for the ride!