Felice Anno Nuovo
..from all the team at OnlineItalianClub.com.
2012 has been a great year for us, and we have big plans to help you learn Italian in 2013.
Another year over…
Thanks to the hiring of our first paid staff member, and to a team of enthusiastic undergraduates doing work experience placements, 2012 saw us adding around a thousand new pages to our site including the Italian verb conjugator, Italian grammar notes, Italian vocabulary exercises, and for the first time, Italian listening comprehension exercises.
The new materials are getting plenty of attention – page views are up nearly 400% since the summer and there are now over 2400 registered members.
However, sometimes it can seem as if we have created a monster! There’s now a mass of material which can be hard to navigate, and worse still, our rather cheap hosting service doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the traffic, which has lead to some frustrating days when our site has been only visible intermittently, or not at all.
A new one just begun..
So, what does 2013 hold for OnlineItalianClub.com?
First of all, we hope to solve the technical problems that have been plaguing us by moving the site to a new hosting provider. That’ll probably be in January, so don’t be surprised if things are a bit chaotic around that time.
Moving hosting will mean that there’ll be a new look for the site too, and we hope to get it right this time, with a more professional looking, easier to navigate and mobile-friendly design!
Of course, we’ll be continuing to develop new free Italian exercises materials for you, but we’ll also be reorganising so that the good stuff is easier to find and so it’s more obvious what should follow what. We’re planning a “course” structure, combining the various resources at each level. And Daniele is enthusiastic about creating more interactive exercises (like these).
The Members Only area will become more important, though membership will continue to be free, and there will still be plenty of useful Italian exercises for people who prefer not to join at all.
Another thing: we’ve always thought that forums are a great way for members to share their passion for learning Italian, and for students of Italian, no matter where they are in the world, to ask for and offer each other help and support. We have to admit, though, that our forums haven’t been a great success so far.
So, one of our tasks for 2013 will be to dream up ways to get more conversations going amongst our members!
And although our primary objective is to provide lots and lots of FREE materials for learning Italian, we figure that if you are, anyway, going to spend money on Italian study materials or online Italian lessons, you might as well have the chance to do it here rather than somewhere else.
So, we’ll be improving our shop, with new e-books to help you learn Italian, better prices on Skype Italian lessons, and generally a more professional shopping cart experience.
Over to you!
So, now it’s your turn. What would YOU like to see us do in the coming 12 months?
Is there something you’d like to see more of? Or less of? Got any crazy ideas you’d like to run past us? Or complaints? Or positive feedback?
Our New Year’s resolution is to help you learn Italian better! Please help us with achieve it by leaving a comment below and telling us how!
