We’re excited to share that we’ve launched a completely new version of SkillPages. With major overhauls to our design and underlying technology, the new SkillPages is intended to deliver a faster and easier way for millions of people to find skilled people and discover new work opportunities. At the heart of SkillPages is our mission to improve the way in which people with skills connect to the people who need them. Everything about our new version is focused on doing just this, so that our millions of members can unlock new opportunities and live more enjoyable lives.
With over 8 million people having joined the SkillPages community and added over 12 million skills, we felt it was time for ‘SkillPages 2′. All members will now start to see their profiles in the new look and feel. With this brand new experience, we’ve introduced the following feature improvements:
1. Dashboard & Owner Area
Up until now there hasn’t been one place to see a snapshot of your activity on SkillPages. So now you have a dedicated dashboard & owner area. This is a window into content relevant to you on SkillPages. From here you can see your messages, notifications, work opportunity responses, recommendations, Skill Page views and more.
2. Your Skill Page
Our new visual design for your Skill Page provides you with a beautiful, powerful resource on which you can easily describe and demonstrate your skills. And you can now create up to 6 Skill Pages complete with unique cover shot, photos, video, text updates and more. With this upgrade, your Skill Pages could become your most important places on the web. Each SkillPage can now be searched for independently and found by people searching for your skills on SkillPages itself, as well as on Google. It’s all about creating a simple place where you can accurately describe what you’re good at and what you love to do, so you’ll get presented with more opportunities.
3. Discover Area
We’ve listened to your feedback about wanting to find people with similar skills and have now added a Discover Area and a Discovery Stream on your dashboard, to help you do just that. This will enable you to connect and find other skilled members with the same skills as yours, discover skill pages we’ve featured and interesting stories from other members.
4. ProPages
ProPages provides you with the opportunity to simply create your own personal unique website for your skills, complete with your own unique domain name (e.g. www.yourskill.com). This means that in less than 5 minutes, you can convert your Skill Pages profile into your very own website, totally separate to the SkillPages platform. With this standalone website for your skills, you’ll get found by even more customers, clients, employers, partners and people who are looking for your skills on the web.
Engineering update
And SkillPages 2 is not just about our look and feel. We’ve also tuned up under the bonnet to make SkillPages faster and more effective.
1. Activate your existing Networks.
We know that you already have your contacts all set up on social networks, in your email service, on twitter and more. So we’ve now made it super easy to find people you know and see your real life connections to skilled people on SkillPages. From today, we’ve integrated directly with all of Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hotmail and others. This enables you to activate your existing networks of contacts, meaning you don’t have to re-build your contact lists on SkillPages. Simply activate your existing networks and we’ll show you people you are connected to, who are already on SkillPages. This makes it simple to find skilled people and work opportunities through your existing network of contacts.
2. SkillGraph
We’ve also released the latest update to SkillGraph, our unique skill matching algorithm. This upgrade makes SkillGraph more accurate and faster, meaning semantically related skill types are matched for relevance in record time. Looking for a carpenter? SkillGraph uniquely identifies that someone with the skill “woodworker” might be relevant to you too. Title your SkillPage “Movie-Director”? SkillGraph makes sure you won’t miss out on an opportunity from someone looking for a “Film-maker”.
Thanks to all those who have given feedback over the recent months. We are just getting warmed up and look forward to sharing more news over the next couple of weeks. We hope you like the new additions, if you have any questions or feedback please let us know.
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