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2011: A new era for our community

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29th Dec 2011
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A look back at the events and content that got AccountingWEB members talking in 2011.

Site upgrade

The key event for AccountingWEB this year was our upgrade. The change was needed because our old system was struggling to keep up with the volume of demand, with more than 200,000 people requesting an average of 1m pages a month.

AccountingWEB’s head of community Jenny Ogden launched a consultation phase for the overhaul, inviting suggestions from members directly and via the upgrade focus group. The entire community’s thanks are due to this group, which included petersaxton, RogerNeale, chatman, Paul Scholes, cathygrimmer, stepurhan, FirstTab, ShirleyM, Nigel Burge, Steve Holloway, Monsoon, Phil Rees and Old Greying Accountant. These members generously gave up their time to give us ideas and feedback from user testing to make AccountingWEB better for all our members.

The new site was launched on 2 August and Jenny outlined the new community features it would deliver: better site performance, ‘report post’ buttons and clearer site navigation. We are really happy with the performance improvement and equally pleased that the new layout directed more visitors to interactive areas such as Any Answers, community blogs and discussion groups.

Time Out 

Another development that emerged in the aftermath of the redesign was the Time Out discussion group to cater for threads that didn’t necessarily address the technical and professional concerns for which Any Answers was designed.

Editor John Stokdyk said: “At AccountingWEB we see Any Answers primarily as a technical resource, and were getting complaints about aggressive, off-topic arguments that put members off participating in potentially interesting topics that veered off course.

“Because Time Out is tucked away from the mainstream, so there’s a little more room for members to enjoy off-beat topics - although the terms and conditions for abuse, libel and self-promotion still hold.”

We’re gratified to see that in terms of both traffic and engagement, Time Out has become a popular and entertaining destination, particularly on Friday afternoons.  AccountingWEB members have posted threads ranging from poetry to accounting jokes to what accountants wear to work.

New faces

While we said farewell to our popular community manager Becky Midgley in August, Henry Osadzinski took on her role seamlessly at the beginning of September and has done a superb job building relationships with members and strengthening our moderation policy to preserve the community spirit.

Henry explained: “Coming from a family of accountants and lawyers, I’d previously considered it all to be a little incomprehensible. I’m happy to say that I’ve had my eyes opened to the more thought-provoking and challenging aspects of the profession.”

He describes Seven year-old shareholder and Accounting for escorts as two of his favourite posts and thinks it’s “great to watch the community really gel and talk through unique problems to come up with creative solutions”.

Henry will continue to work on improving the transparency of AccountingWEB’s policies and development and will carry that on into 2012 with further improvements based on user feedback.

Blogs

Written by members, guest bloggers and the editorial team, AccountingWEB’s blogs expanded to tackle all manner of topic in 2011, including the VAT reverse charge procedure, the House of Lords report on audit and the launch of AccountingWEB’s Google+ page (see box above).

The Guest Blog featured the likes of CIMA’s Victor Smart, CBW’s Andy White and BankLink’s John Haylock whilst Gadget Zone kept our readers up to date with the latest apps, laptops and smartphones. CEO’s Diary and Practitioner’s Diary continued to entertain us with funny, insightful and controversial moments throughout the year.

Discussion groups

By far the most successful of our discussion groups is the Money Laundering and Crime community managed by AML expert David Winch. With more than 1,000 members, it's an invaluable source for legal news, ethical guidance and thought-provoking stories from the darker side of the profession. 

If there are any other specialist topics you would like to see covered, just get in touch with Henry, Jenny or one of the AccountingWEB editors and we'll get to work setting up a new area and finding like-minded members.

Alongside Time Out, Born Dull?! provided entertainment through popular threads such as Joke Friday. Sadly, however, the editor's dream of putting on a musical extravaganza turned out to be a springtime pipe dream. Elsewhere, members expressed their thoughts on poetry and literature in the Book Club and we saw a lot of discussion in the Budget discussion group

AccountingWEB also launched its Student discussion group last month where our student members can gather ideas and ask for assistance from the site's more experienced members. It's still early days, but in 2012 AccountingWEB plans to grow and develop this group. Watch this space for a future developments with our student visitors. 

What were your favourite moments on AccountingWEB in 2011?

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