Schoolnotes Portal
Educational Content Platform
This site has been rebranded as HSCOne in order to better reflect its purpose and ambitions. Additionally, we've started to attract the attention of schools and tuition centers in NSW, so hopefully this is a good sign for the future of the project. You can now find the site at https://hsc.one.
So we're still very stuck, financially speaking. More traffic has resulted in higher costs, as we can't leech off the free plans from Netlify anymore. However, we're hoping to find someone (individual or corporate, we don't really mind either way) who would be willing to fund our work. If you're interested, or know someone else who might be, please leave a comment, or drop an email to partners@schoolnotes.xyz. I'd really appreciate it :)
I'm sort of stuck right now. We're reached the limit of our team's knowledge in different subjects, and most of us are doing exams over the next few weeks which will limit our ability to produce content. Ironically, these same exams are our best opportunity to make a profit for a while yet. If you're willing to help out, I'd really appreciate it. Please leave a comment, or email me.
So, even though we handle exactly 0 user data, and even though there's no login, signup, or any of that on the site, I still wasted an hour and a half today bringing the site from a B to an A+ on Qualys SSLLabs. You can view the results here if you want to. Why? Because I'm avoiding math work. Obviously.
Despite all of my attempts to avoid it, at the end of this month, we're going to start running ads on the site. Why? Because it costs SO MUCH to stay online and relevant. Even these posts on an established platform see exactly 0 views, let alone patronages or donations. I need to maximise every cent I can from this site, so we're going to slowly push more ads each month, maxing out at 6 per post (which isn't a lot when you actually look at the length of the posts themselves). Mission failed, I guess.
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noooooo. don't run ads...
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I don't really have a choice at this point. Content alone takes up massive amounts of time, and yet we're still losing money on it. None of us have the disposable income to justify it for much longer.
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it doesn't take up that much time. i write a lot of content each and every day.
... how can i help?
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An example is a post like this, which took us a week to put together. We had to read and analyse the text, identify every bit that a reader would find useful (Context, themes, techniques, PALS, etc.), and then find external sources to back up what we found. This is, for most of us, on top of going to school and working offline.
If you want to help us out in terms of content, this is our to-do list for the next few weeks. If you're still interested, please either reply to this thread, DM me on Twitter, or send an email to writers@schoolnotes.xyz.
If you want to help us in terms of not running ads (i.e. funding), take a look at our Patreon.
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damn. those are huge posts. yeah, that takes time.
... i'm big into small posts, consistently, over a long period of time...
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The issue is that we can't split posts much smaller than that. A post that covers one syllabus point will be around 200 words, so users will waste more time trying to find the exact bit they need (this was the issue I found with services like Scienceflip). The only intermediate size is just arbitrarily splitting posts, but that, IMO, makes navigation even worse.
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How much traffic do you have? The ads will only benefit if you have a large number of users. How about some paid courses?
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Paid courses defeats the original idea of free education, and the target audience tends to not have jobs (and therefore won't really stick around if what they're looking for costs money). This is, I think, one of the biggest issues with targeting high school students: you can't monetise directly from them, because many won't have a source of income which they can spend digitally, but you still need to have some sort of gain because of the time spent on development.
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So yet another milestone: We're going live on ProductHunt at 12:30 this Wednesday, to give the internet plenty of time to ask questions and take a look at the site before I get home. I'm slowly cleaning up bits of the homepage in the meantime, so we'll see how it goes.
So we recently reached out to Healthchecks.io, a service which provides remote monitoring for servers, hoping they'd consider us as a non-profit (since, you know, we haven't made any profit) and after a bit of discussion on how we use their service, they agreed to officially support us! We've bumped them to the top of our "Supporters" section, so hopefully we both benefit from this (us from the free stuff, them from the bonus backlink).
I've requested publication on ProductHunt and BetaList, so hopefully people that we don't know personally will start to use the site. Our SEO rankings are being drowned out by other websites with similar names, but hopefully if I can get a whole lot of traffic from interested people, and more backlinks by publishing the site on advertising forums, it might be enough to get us to front page status. Right now, the ranking averages around position 20.3, which is like... second page of Google? I've also moved from Google Analytics to Cloudflare because:
- The target audience is schoolkids (aka minors), and Google doesn't need any more information about them,
- Google Analytics is so terribly optimised (73kB), and drags down Lighthouse scores by over 10 points,
- GA is blocked by nearly all adblockers (and nearly all our users have adblockers) and,
- Cloudflare is privacy-first, and has a script less than half the size.
However, if this is affecting search rankings because Google is getting inadequate stats, we're gonna have to figure out a workaround. If anyone has ideas, please let me know and, as always, please share the site with anyone who might find it useful.
https://schoolnotes.xyz
We now have 1 patron on Patreon, and got our first payout of 5.30$ USD from arc. Hopefully by advertising the site, we'll get more users and more revenue streams, justifying our continued efforts into keeping it up and running. We're also looking at bringing in more subjects like Multimedia and IPT, but we'll see how it goes.
https://schoolnotes.xyz
This site has been running for nearly 2 years now, but we’ve realised that our process for content publication and writing hasn’t been as transparent as we originally planned. As a result, we decided to make this (not so) short explainer on how we create posts, where we source our information, and how reliable our content should be considered.
https://schoolnotes.xyz/blog/writing-process/
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