Changes to our website

Those of you who have studied with us since we released our first lesson in June 2006 will have become familiar with our old site. That site, however, contained largely 'static' content and required a considerable amount of manual updating and time-consuming maintenance at our end.

For several months, we have been working on a major overhaul of our old site. We hope the result - which will continue to undergo development - will provide a better experience for users of the site and will allow easier site administration at our end.

Perhaps the biggest change we have implemented is to our subscription system. This system worked well when we had a smaller amount of content available. Now, however, with many hundreds of pages of learning material, we have found that some users want to 'pick and choose' Lesson Guides, rather than necessarily studying everything that we produce. We have therefore implemented a system whereby users can purchase Download Credits and use these Credits to choose particular content that better suits their own needs. Download Credits will also allow users to access content other than our Lesson Guides which will be available soon, including:

• short stories with accompanying comprehension questions and grammatical analyses
• PDF versions of our Français Plus magazine (currently used by Secondary School students)
• one-off articles de l'actualité (news articles) written in French that is simpler than one finds in the French press (also including comprehension questions and grammatical analyses

Our payment options are new, too. A small number of our users were finding it difficult to make a payment via PayPal on our old site. Consequently, we have now integrated two, fully secure payment gateways on our site, both Realex Payments and PayPal. (Realex Payments handle transactions for major clients including Vodafone and Aer Lingus, as well as for hundreds of small businesses like ours. Our Realex gateway now offers an option to those users who do not wish, for whatever reason, to make a payment via PayPal.)

There are new search facilities, too, at the right-hand side of every page in our site. The Search LFBP box allows you to search for terms like 'Lesson 52', 'pouvoir', 'depuis', and so on, while the Tag Cloud shows common search words and expressions which can be clicked directly to bring up Guides containing the relevant word or expression. (Note that we are currently 'tagging' (i.e. associating pertinent search terms with) all our PDF content. This 'tagging' process is not yet complete: consequently, the Search box and Tag Cloud may not yield fully accurate results.)

See our Support page for answers to other frequently asked questions (FAQ).