Hello again and welcome to another set of patch notes.
We're continuing the interestingly named sprints after last month's Weapon X. This one was Arcade (no deep meaning - it simply happened to have a nice ring in the random name generator I used).
Arcade was mostly focused on 1 thing: Category pages, along with a few little random bits and pieces.
Category pages
This is a type of page we knew we needed for a while but for a number of different reasons (mostly limited resources and requiring various infrastructure in place before we could make them effective), we hadn't been able to launch before today.
It is basically a page designed to make the Google bot gods happy (Google's algorithm) and if you've ever found a venue listing or marketplace website from a Google search, you've probably seen a page similar to this. It includes:
- a pre-filtered selection of Tutti spaces, displayed within a version of our search page, which allows you to narrow your search immediately (without having to click through to /search)
- An h1 title detailing what collection of spaces these are
- A description that shares a bit more detail about what types of spaces we're highlighting here and some key features they may share.
- A few testimonials from happy customers for people to peruse while scrolling through our spaces
- A few key FAQs related to the specific spaces listed here.
- Some buttons that help direct you to relevant pages on the website
- A map (on desktop) to help you narrow your search to a geographical area
According to people much smarter than me, the combination of this information structured in the right way will please the Google gods.
You can check out all our category pages here: https://www.tutti.space/hire
URL forwarding
This has been a thorn in our side for a while. IF a user ever wanted to change the name of one of their listings (perhaps to try a different name for the space, or maybe they moved so the location was no longer correct), their URL would change and the previous one would break. So if an artist had saved the space's previous URL and tried to go back to it, it wouldn't work, the user would get frustrated, and the host would potentially lose a booking.
Fortunately, we've now fixed it so that if you do change your listing's URLs the old ones will still forward to the new ones, at least until the old ones are taken by someone else.
Verified hosts
We've mentioned verified hosts a few times before. We have multiple articles telling hosts how they can become verified. But we haven't made it clear before now which hosts are verified and which are not, before now.
But we've been made aware that artists want to know who our best hosts are, so we've implemented a verified badge. If you display nice photos of your listing (either provided by you or you can hire our in-house photographer), fill out your information, and verify your ID with our payment provider, Stripe, you will get a nice green badge & a tick at the top left of your listing in search. Other benefits of being verified include:
- Your listing may appear in the shuffled selection of spaces on the home page
- We'll promote your space more regularly in our ads and social media
- Our search algorithm will prioritise showing your spaces
Speaking of the algorithm, here's another little insight about Tutti that will help you win at being a host with us. We at Tutti are determined to give every host equal opportunity to reach the top of our search. We will never charge you money for that position and you don't need any special technical knowledge (unlike Google's search); you simply need to be a good community member and you will be able to get there:
- Set up your payment details with Stripe (so that our system can pay you automatically)
- Respond to requests promptly
- Provide artists with a good experience when they book your spaces
- Share correct & detailed information about your spaces
We'll share more about this in future blog posts, patch notes, and FAQs when we build the system out a bit further.
Related spaces
A key thing we've had a number of users tell us they're missing on Tutti, compared to other venue listing sites out there, is related spaces. Often when you scroll to the bottom of a listing on Airbnb or some comparable site, there'll be a list of similar spaces that you can compare against the one you're looking at.
This sprint, we launched the first version of our iteration on that. (It's a bit broken at the moment but it'll get fixed over the coming weeks.) IF the host has more than 1 space, either at this same location or somewhere else, those spaces will be visible. At the same time, there will be a list of spaces from different hosts that have similar settings to the space you are currently looking at.
Bug fixes / tweaks
- Fixed a bug causing the menu icon & profile photo both to display on mobile
- Cleaned up listing info on mobile
- Clarified some statuses in version history
- Fixed a disappearing quote pricing issue
- Preview price was 100X less than actual price when listing a space - fixed
- Request from user: when you enter a location into search on home page, it doesn't automatically search. It goes to 'search anything' and then you can manually search
- Fixed some Segment event issues
- Filters were in the wrong section on list a space - fixed
- Site occasionally loaded with no user info visible - fixed
- Changed some language from "Booking request" to "Enquiry" to help clarify the difference between sending an initial message with dates & times vs actually having a confirmed booking.
- Removed "You won't be charged yet" from 'edit booking times' modal
Wrap up
So there you have it - those are the highlights of features we launched today.
If you ever want to see a history of all features we've launched since we started working on Tutti, you can find that on Trello.
If you want to read more of these detailed breakdowns of what changes we've made (and sometimes why), you can find those articles in our Patch Notes.
Hope you enjoyed this set of patch notes today (July 13th 2021).
Till next time,
Gabriel