MeetTutors.com

Company description

Looking for tutoring jobs or tutors?
Check out www.MeetTutors.com.

MeetTutors.com is a user-driven online community for tutors looking for students and students looking for tutors. Our mission is to connect people by creating an online community that facilitates educational and cultural exchanges.

How it works:

1. Browse the existing tutor/student listing.
2. Sign up and post a profile.
3. Contact

* It is free to join and use any searching tools available on the Site.

Member types:

Tutors: post secondary students, current/retired teachers, freelance tutors, etc.
Students: K-12 adult students, post secondary students, international students, new immigrants, etc.
Parents: parents seeking tutors for their school-aged children (K-12)

Subjects:

K-12: all academic subjects, SAT/Provincial Exam/LPI/TOEFL prep, etc
Post secondary: all post secondary subjects, languages, etc.
ESL: speaking, writing, proofreading
Extracurricular: Music, Fine Arts, Sports, etc.

Case 1:

A local Canadian mother can find a SFU Physics tutor for her Grade 12 son, while finding a tutoring job for herself to teach English to a new immigrant.

Case 2:

A 4th year Sociology student can find a grad student to get some help on her research project, while finding a tutoring job to teach a Grade 10 student Social Studies.

MeetTutors.com was launched in December 2006. Within a month and a half after going live, the Site reached the 200,000 level on the Alexa rating and 4 on the Page Rank.

Jenny's Step-by-step for Dreamers

1. Refining your business idea and creating a business plan

Attend e-commerce seminars and consult with industry experts. Starting a business is one thing, but doing it online is another. Make your inspiration meet fruition by creating a concrete business plan that works online.

In the case of MeetTutors.com, consultation with Andy Latter, an eBC consultant, was invaluable. He shared his expertise as a web developer by going through from A to Z about the development of a database-driven website like MeetTutors.com, and gave us practical suggestions. Also, Christina Baumgartner (eBC consultant)'s guidance on web design helped us a lot in refining the design layout.

eBC's seminars like e-Marketing, Online payment and Legal issues are strongly recommended.

2. Naming your business

Many start-ups find naming very difficult. The name should be easy to remember yet meaningful. If you want to match your company name, operating business name and the domain name, checking the availability of your desired domain name is step one.

In the case of MeetTutors.com, www.MeetTutors.com is an operating business of MeetTutors Online Inc. It was interesting to discover that not many people know that 'Online' could be a 'descriptive element' in corporate naming.

3. Developing the website

Unless you have an in-house developer, meeting the right web developer is very important. Know what is required to build your website and create your own set of criteria before you select a web developer. eBC has an excellent set of guidelines on this.

In the case of MeetTutors.com, we needed to develop a database-driven web application, which enables users to post their profiles, search and contact each other.

1. Post profile and search: Users should be able to post their profiles and search other members.
2. Contact: Members should be able to contact other members. In order to ensure user privacy while making communication between tutors and students/parents easy, we needed to build our own contact system.
3. Maintain: The web application should be designed in a way that is easy to maintain.

The set of criteria we had for the selection of a developer was the following.

• Expertise: As it was a whole new web application, the developer should have the expertise and experience to build it.
• Team: The developer should be a team of experienced developers with a good organizational structure. This was important because it was a relatively lengthy software development project, which required seamless project coordination and a series of testing trials.
• Professionalism and trustworthiness: The developer should be highly motivated and a trustworthy professional with whom we could develop not only the site, but also a long-term working relationship.

After having a number of consultations with the eBC consultants and using their guidelines, we met DPG Associates Web Design, who met all of our criteria. DPG Associates not only has expertise in building new software, but also build maintenance-friendly systems.

DPG's Content Management System (CMS)

CMS allows the non-technical user to easily update their website. The features include, but not limited to:

• The administration and publishing interface is browser-based so that it can be accessed from any computer anytime - anywhere
• Create customizable pages
• Keep your content up to date and your visitors coming back
• Image and file uploading functionality
• Edit the HTML code of a page to perform more complex changes and/or to insert new tags
• Create tables to display your new content
• Edit your styles and change the look of your site quickly
• Create and manage your photo galleries
• Administrator can specify what content can and cannot be updated
• Reduce website maintenance costs
• CMS has a fully functional shopping cart - e-commerce enabled
• Edit page properties to optimize your web site for indexing on search engines
• Includes site statistics

4. Marketing your business

Marketing begins even before you develop a website. It is important to have a well thought-out plan for how you want to design your website, because everything from font size/style to the keywords you use in title tag affects your marketing results.

It depends on the type of business you are to determine which marketing tactic will work for you. Our suggestion is that you attend eBC's Starting and Growing series and develop your own combination of marketing methods out of many they suggest.

e-Marketing is important for e-Businesses; however, the impact of offline marketing should not be overlooked. Metro News featured a story on MeetTutors.com on January 22, 2007, a month after the site was launched. The number of hits jumped, and our Alexa rating reached the 200,000 level in that week.

5. Growing your site and ensuring that your site is Search Engine Optimized (SEO)

Continuous development: We think a good website is simple and it works well. A simple and effective system is a prerequisite for organic growth of an online community like MeetTutors.com. This requires continuous development work, not to mention maintenance. The trustworthy aspect of the online community is also key to the growth. We continuously work toward developing measures to improve the web experience of our users. Our current Tutor Rating System is one of the outcomes.

Focus, Content, and Work flow: Through the CMS software updates to the content, Meta tags, page properties, and work flow can be changed and managed. This allows us to change our keyword density on pages and optimize our website for results.