DGB Jobs Gets A Major Revamp

I introduced a new service on this website, DGB Jobs, near the start of the year in what was a trial period at the time. The aim was to allow employers in the window industry to post their vacancies on this new part of DGB for free. Those looking for a change in direction within UK fenestration could browse the service to see if there was anything that took their fancy.

Although I was only trialling the service at the time, as I was unsure if anyone one would actually use it, it took off a lot stronger than I thought it would. I was aware that there were a number of recruitment services out there online that were specific to our industry, so I wasn’t all that sure that people and companies would bother to use it. I was happy to be proved wrong.

Because it was only in a trial phase, it wasn’t a polished service. That became evident when I was overloaded with entries from a number of companies all at the same time. I was displaying the whole of the job entry on a single screen, split up into three columns. It worked for the first few, but as the submissions kept coming, the DGB Jobs Dashboard page became far too long. I was showing way too much information on screen at the time.

Trial period over. I had to revamp it in such a way as to make it much easier for people to navigate around the submissions. It was something I said I would tackle a month or two ago, and I have just completed a big part of it.

Easier navigation experience

It occurred to me that I was creating rather a lot of work for myself by displaying the content as I was. Plus, it was a bit much to look at on screen. It hit me that the easiest way to display this was to do it in exactly the same way I would do my own blog posts.

So, I began to publish each job listing as a post, just like I would a normal post I would write myself. I got rid of the out of date ones and only published the ones that we either still in date or had no details related to time.

From there, I used one of the theme’s building blocks to filter out all other content other than the job listings and show them on the dashboard page. You can click here to see it, or keep on reading. The changed layout is far cleaner, much more easier to navigate and by doing it this way the newest listings will always appear at the top:

I think pretty much all of you will agree that this is a much better way of displaying the vacancies than previously. All people need to do is click on the link like they would normally to read my own blog posts. From there you will see a much cleaner job posting layout, with all the details needed, including buttons to take you back to the dashboard and to the page where you can submit your own listing if your company is looking to hire.

From here I hope that companies will continue to use the service now that it is easier to manage and much better to navigate.

Staying free

Sorting out the UX of DGB Jobs was my main priority. I don’t plan to change how the service works. I will still keep the DGB Jobs home page as the place for people to read about the service and upload their job vacancies. I will also continue to manually publish them to make sure no spam gets into the system and so I can make my own tweaks to make sure it reads right. With my new publishing system, this will become much quicker and live vacancies will appear on the site much quicker than they did previously.

I will still require people and companies to tell me if they have filled the post. So if you have a vacancy on there at the moment and it has been filled, give me a shout so I can take it down.

I am also going to keep the service free. A few have told me that I could be charging for this service, or at least introduce a premium service to it where I could charge. And yes, I could charge and some companies probably would be happy to pay for it. But as I said at the beginning, I’m not doing this for the money, rather than expand DGB as a site so it becomes more useful to more people, I can help grow traffic and hopefully I can be useful to companies and people who need to expand their staff and find a change of direction.

Hopefully you will take a minute to check out the new version, and you will continue to submit your job vacancies in this new and improved format. Let me know what you think via the comments section below.