Major Site Developments

It's taken over 10 years to get around to it, but we've finally added better searching and filtering capabilities to Hallshire.

It's always been the intention for the site to include the ability for people to search by facilities and capacity. It's why we ask people, when adding their hall, to tick all the relevant facilities and equipment checkboxes. However up until now these values have just been dumped out onto the halls details pages and not queried in any useful way when searching.

That is until now, as it's now possible for a visitor to filter their results, not just by location, but by whether or not the venue has changing facilities, accessible toilets, parking, etc. The list is pretty long, all kinds of useful things infact, which should make the process of finding a suitable venue so much easier and also help highlight halls which might otherwise be overlooked.

The search by capacity feature is also another really useful one. When people are trying to find a suitable venue for a large wedding for example, there's no point returning tiny village halls, when you need to seat 1500 people! On that note, it might also be worth double checking the values you've previously entered for capacity, as previously these could be non-numeric, and for the search by capacity to work, these values had to be converted to numbers. So please update your listing to ensure the value entered for your hall is correct. You can leave the capacity value blank, however this will mean your hall doesn't appear under capacity related searches.

Does your hall have parking and outside space?

You can now specify if your hall has both parking and outside space. These are in addition to the previous existing facilities listed as options on the site. Halls can then be filtered against these facilities, allowing people greater power when looking for suitable venues.

You can update the facilities available to your hall, including whether you have parking and outside space, by editing your hall, and clicking through to the 'edit facilities' page, where you can tick all the relevant checkboxes.

Improved categorisation of hall uses

Along with the improvements around filtering, we've also added the ability for people to classify suitable uses for their hall. This came up because one of our members wanted to stipulate that their hall could only be hired for educational purposes, as they were being contacted by people looking to hire the venue for birthday parties etc, which just weren't suitable for the venue.

We've complied the following list of possible uses for halls, but please let us know if your hall can be used for any other purpose and we'll consider adding it to the list.

• Anniversary Parties
• Baby Groups
• Band Practise
• Birthday Parties
• Children's Parties
• Christenings / Blessings
• Church Event / Choir Practice
• Dog Training
• Educational Pursuits
• Fitness Classes / Yoga
• Local Community Meetings
• Music Events
• Naming Ceremonies
• Other
• Reunions
• School Events
• Societies and Clubs
• Theatre Productions
• Training
• Wakes
• Wedding Venue

It's important to update your listing to specify suitable uses for your hall, as in the coming months we'll be rolling out the feature to filter halls by function. The functions you specify for your hall will then also be used as possible subject lines on the enquiry form, so people can only contact you with relevant enquiries.

Improved tablet version

We released a mobile version of the site a few months ago, but now the site should also work much better on tablets such as ipads. You should see a very similar version of the site, just reduced to fit the available space on these smaller devices.

There have been a number of other 'behind the scenes' changes over the past couple of weeks, but I won't bore you with all the details in this post.

Have a great Christmas everyone!