What shipped in the first fortnight

I put it out with a page of notes and no plan. Twenty people wrote to me: dancers, teachers, people who run schools. Plus the likes and the reshares, which I had not expected at all. And one request kept coming back: my school isn't on here.

So most of this list is not what I thought the site needed. It is what people asked for.

Added

• Five schools. Studio 68, Playground London, Ventures Studio, ARC and MVMT. Every one of them because somebody asked.
• A search box. Type a teacher, a style or a school and the list narrows as you type.
• Absolute Beginner, as its own level. “Beginner” in a London studio often means “you have done this before, just not much”. First-timers need to know which classes are for them, and schools write that in the description rather than the level.
• Filters in the address. Pick heels and the page becomes /style/heels, so you can send somebody exactly what you were looking at.

Fixed

• A rule of mine was overruling the schools. Ungraded K-pop classes get filed as All Level, which is right. Except mine also overwrote 45 classes where the school had stated a level. The school's word comes first now; my rule only fills a silence.
• Class descriptions are quoted, not reprinted. The site was carrying up to 600 characters of each school's own copy. Those are not facts, they are the paragraph a school wrote to sell its class. One line now, then a link to them.
• A phone shows nearly twice as many classes. A row was 193 pixels and the Book button owned a whole line of it.

One number worth having

Three of the fourteen schools publish how many places are left, so for eleven days I recorded every class every hour. 689 classes, watched to their start.

11,245 places booked out of 26,158. About 43% full.

Everyone I dance with talks about classes selling out. A few do. Most run a little under half. Walk-ins are on top of that, and by how much I cannot say, because a booking system is the one place that cannot see them.

That one is getting its own post.

Next

Writing to the fourteen schools, smallest first.