Update on DartmouthRoomSearch.com

This is just a quick update on where DartmouthRoomSearch is. It finally comes up on the first page of Google when you search "dartmouth room search"! And it's first! I've been using Google Analytics to track hits, which has been interesting.

The site initially went live April 2nd, and it's now May 14th. In that time, the site has had 2,028 users, 8,326 pageviews, and an average session length of over 2 and a half minutes. While it admittedly peaked early in attention when I posted it in the college Facebook group, hitting 441 daily sessions, it has since equalized around 60 views per day. It had momentary other peaks on May 1st, 6th, and 9th, probably because of room draw.

Now there are a couple of features that I was interested in adding, including searching buildings based on location to key landmarks, pairing roommates who don't have ones, and an overall ranking system. I was also planning on adding sorting for bathrooms, and some prior data. However, the housing office doesn't have data from the previous years, and with the new housing system coming up for next year, I'm unsure of the purpose that the site will have, or even how room draw will work next year. In light of that, I've currently stopped working on it, and am just kind of waiting.

The college recently released updated floorplans for this year (whether because of me or because it was just time), but they removed the information regarding size of the rooms. This means my site is really the only easy way of linking to the older floorplans. They're currently in the process of remeasuring the rooms, so I may have to take that into account next year depending on the system they settle on. In the meantime, it'll be up if anyone wants to use it, and if the funding through the DALI Pitch happens, it will have its own server that it can run on for the foreseeable future.