The Quad of the Future

Last year was a really good year for the Quad. We set out to help BU discover and grow its student community by writing unique and innovative articles about the groups, events, and issues that others missed. Last year, we wrote some 500 articles to this effect, and the BU community responded with over half a million hits, 150,000 unique visits, and 700 comments in our 9 active months. Thank you so much for the support! We also received hundreds of emails from student groups, students and faculty commenting on the site. The majority of this feedback was overwhelmingly positive and some was critical and helpful, but they all told us one thing: keep going.

We’ve really taken that to heart, and this year we’re releasing a vastly improved website with some huge, brand new features. Some of these features are still experimental, some may succeed beyond our expectations, and some may fail, but all of them are still grounded in the mission we’ve been following since last October: to help bring BU together.

The Scoop

The Scoop is a new section designed to take advantage of BU’s vibrant twitter community. It’s a real-time discussion engine designed to allow all of us to talk about breaking news and stories in and around BU like events, emergencies, traffic jams, etc. Here’s how it works:

1. Our writers send an update to the quad using twitter.
2. This update gets posted to buquad.com as a scoop.
3. The update goes out over the @buquad twitter feed.
4. You and the BU community reply to the tweet.
5. Your tweets are posted as updates to the original scoop.

Test it out now by following @buquad on twitter and replying to one of our tweets tagged #quadscoop.

Quad Events

One of the common complains we tend to get from student groups and bands is that they have no place to promote their events. We’re changing all of that with a brand new BU events calendar made specifically for groups to have an easy way to reach a lot of students (see those numbers above). Student groups can submit a basic event to the calendar right from our site for free. If they want to upgrade to a paid event with images, links, a calendar, and special promotions on the site, they can do so for just $5. See the events section for more information.

New Home Page

We’re launching a new home page that displays more information, more readably. We think it’s really slick, and we hope you’ll like it too.

Mobile Site

Get out your iPhone, Android, or Blackberry and check out the site. It’s all there, specially formatted and easy and fast to browse on your mobile device.

Improved Social Integration

You can now like our Facebook fanpage, like our posts on Facebook to share with your friends, and tweet our posts right from the website.

IE7 Compatibility

Yeah, okay, this isn’t that cool, but for those of you using Internet Explorer 7, the site looks and works a whole lot better now. Enjoy.

We’re All About You

In case we haven’t mentioned it yet, we want to thank the entire BU community for helping us grow and achieve our mission. We could not do it without your comments, suggestions, feedback, and of course, readership. This year especially we want to welcome your feedback and suggestions to help make us even better. BU: this is your Quad.

About Gabe Stein

Gabe Stein (CAS '11), was the founding CTO and Associate Publisher of the Quad.

View all posts by Gabe Stein →

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