The research Funding blog is getting a new look. Following feedback from users, we will be categorising funds by research areas. We have also brought in many other changes based on people comments.

The general the feedback on the blog was positive with people finding the site easy to navigate. But there were some suggestions on how to improve the site, we have been making changes in response to this.

We have introduced a Rate the Post feature which allows people to rate posts out of five. We would love to hear from you, so please use this and make use of the comments box below posts. We get lots of comments by email, but by sharing them on the blog it may get noticed by another researcher in a different faculty that you don’t know and make them aware of shared research interests.

The issue of sending daily emails was highly contentious. Some people really value it where as others found it too frequent. This left us in a situation where we were not going to be able to please everyone. We felt that it would be better to have the option of getting the daily emails and allowing people to ignore it rather than not having daily emails as an option at all.

There were also comments regarding the look of the emails. We have set up a new sign up system from the blog which sends out the emails in a more attractive HTML format. The structure of WordPress is currently preventing us from automatically converting all emails to this version. But if you would like to sign up using the subscribe box on the right of the blog, you will be able to access this new version of the daily update.

The team also plans to change the system in which blog posts are categorised to make them more focused on research areas rather than the current system of type of funder. This should make it easier to filter blogs by subject area. When this is activated it will change the location of existing posts, so please bear with us whilst things are reorganised –we have published over 250 posts since December 2012, so it will take some time to relocate them all. This change should be happening very soon.

We are currently exploring the feasibility of enabling people to register an account with the blog and then select themes of what information they would like to be sent. This will enable us to make the content much more tailored to individual interests. So far we have had technical difficulties in getting this to work. If we manage to resolve the issues we will send out details of how to set up an account.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the blog, we hope that the changes we have made and are bringing in will make the site and even more useful tool for you to use.

If you ever need to find our site you can get there using our new web address www.staffs.ac.uk/researchfunding