We are very excited to announce that the new website that we’ve been working on for the past several months will be launched on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 6:00AM MDT. Music Teacher’s Helper may be unavailable for up to an hour while we perform the update. Thank you for your patience during this time.
Here are just some of the improvements you’ll notice with the new site:
- Beautiful new design. A much cleaner and more modern look, both on our main website and after you login to your account.
- Simplified menus. Most notably, the “Website” menu is now on the main menu. And you can now control all site settings from a single “Settings” page found in the upper-right hand corner.
- Improved Calendar. We’ve made huge improvements to the calendar. The day/week view now make it easy to see event duration, to help you spot openings and conflicting events. We’ve also added more location icons, and improved the category color picker.
- Calendar Filters. Filter the calendar to show only the students, locations, and categories you want to see. This is especially useful if you have a lot of events on your calendar as it offers a less cluttered viewing option. Or hide the sidebar for a full-width view.
- Simplified searching and paging on all lists on the site.
- Improved Help system. You can now show/hide Help boxes on any page by clicking the question mark on left side of the menu.
- Custom E-mail Templates. In addition to the system e-mail templates like e-mail reminders and payment receipts, you can now create your own custom e-mail templates, which you can send to students at any time.
- No More Pop-ups. Whether reconciling individual events from the calendar or home page, or editing payments or fees in your transaction log, it can all be done faster now because we’ve replaced pop-up windows with an nice overlay effect. Much better.
We’ve also fixed a number of recent bugs including:
- Problems with lesson dates saving for those using the new UK date format.
- Problems with duplicate events being created when extending a repeating event into the future.
- Many other small or rare bugs
In addition, we’re launching a new Home page design, with a new intro video tutorial, feature descriptions, testimonials page, and more. We will be recreating the other video tutorials in the weeks ahead to keep them up to date.
We hope you’ll enjoy these new improvements.
This ‘NEW-CALENDAR’ IS NOT WORKING & HAVE LOST ALL OF MY ‘SCHEDULED-INFORMATION!!!!’
I too, am having the same problem as Dr. Certain. Will we be able to get our schedule information back?
Yes, sorry for the scare. We hadn’t completely finished the update yet when you checked it. All of your data should be showing fine now.
Yes, thank you, it is fixed!!
I’m not a huge fan of the lesson reconciliation page — I always thought the text boxes were too small by default, and now having to click to add notes (and again for private notes) just seems to add unnecessary clutter to the workflow.
I’m glad that the calendar has been overhauled however!
Love the new updates!! It does have a sharper appearance & I was having trouble with accidental duplicates in the past.
Brandon,
Wow! You have done a lot of work! Thank you for keeping the site fresh and interesting.
There is more white space which I like very much. And navigation is handy and user friendly.
Not a fan of the upgrade. ..so sorry. I need efficiency more than a cosmetic face lift. I am now having to click, drag and scroll more than before. I will have 60 students soon and efficiency is my future for further growth. Bringing back the month “next/previous ” at the bottom of the calendar pagewould help one of my scrolling issues. Y’all are doing a wonderful job and thanks for considering our input: )
Brandon,
I’m having some issues with the new calendar. I’ve set up to have lesson reminders sent out to students a day in advance and I just quickly reviewed the reminders for tomorrow (Monday) and discovered that there were two scheduled lessons that didn’t appear on the calendar! Unfortunately, I had put another student at one of those times.
I’m still finding that the MTH calendar and my Google calendar don’t always agree.
Having the previous and next scroll buttons at the bottom of the calendar would be great as would returning to the date being worked on when an event has been added or changed.
I like the icons as a quick reminder of what the event is (lesson, rehearsal, performance etc) but find that when they are enabled, a large portion of the student’s name is missing.
Thanks for all your work on MTH! The really important issue for me is the lessons missing from the calendar! Obviously, they are somewhere in the system because the reminders were sent out.
Cheers,
Craig
@Music Rocks & @Jerry – Glad you like the new site! Yes, it’s been a lot of work, but overall, I think it’s a huge improvement. The navigation is much more simple, more white space gives you more breathing room, and parts of it are faster as well.
@Dustin – We’ve received a lot of feedback similar to yours, so we went back to how it was before on the Reconcile page. It now shows the notes boxes without you having to click a link to open them.
@teacher4u – Thanks for your feedback. Yes, we removed the navigation at the bottom of the calendar, but you can now page through the calendar much more quickly with the navigation at the top. And you can also jump to any date instantly using the mini-calendar in the sidebar. You can also hide the calendar sidebar for more horizontal space on devices. We do take all feedback into consideration, though, so if we need to put some navigation at the bottom, we can.
@Craig – If you’re having trouble seeing certain events, it could be because the calendar filter isn’t enabled in the sidebar. For example, the checkbox for global events may not be checked. If you’re still having trouble, please contact our Support team via e-mail. We’ll gladly help you resolve the issues you’re having with Google calendar as well. We have fixed the bug with the lesson titles being cut off. For more space, you can also hide the sidebar. Thanks for your feedback!
Thank you! This article helped me to launch my website in 2 days! Great!
I cannot reach you at all and I am a subscriber! Please help me. I cannot use Music Teachers Helper at all. A pop up saying I need to use a CD ROM and Microsoft Professional 2000 interfers.
@Heather – If you need help using Music Teacher’s Helper, you can contact our support team directly at support (at) musicteachershelper.com, or fill out the form on our Support page. If you’re getting a popup about a Microsoft CD-ROM, that has nothing to do with Music Teacher’s Helper, and is most likely coming from another program that’s on your computer. I’m sorry for the frustration. It’s possible that you’re trying to use a browser that you originally installed from a CD that is now missing. It’s hard to tell without more info. We recommend Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome for the best browsing experience. If you continue to have trouble, please contact our support team, and we will help you further.