“Q2” is wrapped and in the books (April, May, June), and what a quarter it has been. As a company, we use the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) model for high-level work planning, which assigns initiatives as “rocks” that can be completed in three months. That makes the end of the quarter the perfect time to look back and see what we’ve accomplished.
Multi-Credit Ordering Experience
At the start of this year, we noticed a trend that students buying financial planning or certification courses often didn’t realize that those same courses would also qualify for continuing education credits in related lines of business. We work hard to get our courses approved for delivery in as many lines as possible, so for students that need them to be unaware of this choice was concerning. In response, we updated our checkout process in Q2 to automatically check for possible dual and multi-credit options, and proactively offer those additional certificates to any students that may have missed them during course selection.
Login Integration with IRMI.com
We partner with the International Risk Management Institute (IRMI) for many of our property and casualty courses, as well as to offer several corporate certifications for the risk management industry. Starting this month, IRMI Online subscribers will be able to use their IRMI accounts to access and complete all their continuing education and certification courses on the WebCE IRMI Learning Center. Simply login to either site using the “Login with IRMI” link on the login page and have one less password to worry about
New Blog Layout and Organization
One of the WebCE core values that we live by is “Trusted,” which we define as “Having integrity and sharing knowledge." Our publicly available blogs are one of the ways we do this, by supplying regular updates on assorted topics in the industries we serve. This quarter we made them even easier to find and use in the following ways:
- Defined five unique blog segments, each with tags to additionally categorize posts by industry.
- Changed the URL structure to better align with user queries and remove excess length.
- Added schema reference information for use by Google and other search engines.
We want to continue to share what we know, and hope that these changes allow everyone to better find and access the information they need.
Page Speed Improvements with Cloudflare Zaraz
I hate waiting. So does the rest of the engineering team. We're constantly looking for ways to improve our page speed and website performance. Due to a variety of caching techniques at various application layers, our sites respond almost instantly to most user requests. That said, in the worst-case scenario of a 1) first-time user with 2) no caching on 3) a slow cell phone connection, our metrics showed that WebCE.com could take up to 8 seconds to properly load all required resources. This was not acceptable.
With the help of Cloudflare Zaraz , we were able to offload 90% of our JavaScript resources and dramatically increase our page speed. With these changes in place, our worst-case-scenario load time is now down to only 2.5 seconds! For the average user it will be hard to notice the change from “lightning fast” to “extra lightning fast,” but for select few in those poor reception conditions this change is a life saver. We now also boast industry-leading metrics from several external services:
Wrapping Up
Whether we’re adding entirely new systems, enhancing and adding features to existing products, or streamlining our core services, WebCE is constantly working to improve the experience for our users. Q3 is ramping up now, and we can’t wait for you to experience the exciting work ahead.