Have you seen our new website? It’s now connected to Twitter too!
Congratulations CILS students!
Congratulazioni!
“Congratulazioni” to the 21 students who passed a CILS Italian language exam at Madrelingua this summer!
Liudmill and Samantha passed the A2 exam.
Guillermo got his B1.
Yuki, Palma Boglarka, Charlotte, Guilherme, Fernando, Gonzalo, Carlos Javier, Laura, Jorge, Ana, Fernando, Maria Isabela and Hye Kyoung all receive B2 CILS certificates.
At C1, Adel, Viktoria and Sophia were successful!
And finally there were two passes at the highest, C2, level: Luciene and Marli Joanina.
Well done to all of you!
CILS December 2012
For students interested in the next session of CILS exams in Bologna, there are still a few days left in which you can enroll.
Check out our CILS page for details of the course + exam offer: you could save the price of an A1 or A2 exam, or get €40 off a higher level exam, if you sign up for a course at the same time.
CILS Practice Materials
Check out these free practice materials on OnlineItalianClub.com:
B1 Level
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/B1-tipo1.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/B1-tipo-2.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/B1-tipo-4-Giulia.pdf
B2 Level
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/B2-tipo1.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/B2-tipo-2.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/B2-tipo-4-Giulia.pdf
C1 Level
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/C1-tipo1.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/C1-tipo-2.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/C1-tipo-4.pdf
C2 Level
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/C2-tipo1.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/C2-tipo-2.pdf
http://onlineitalianclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/C2-tipo-4.pdf
CILS forum
Last, but not least, don’t forget the CILS forum on OnlineItalianClub.com. The place to ask your questions about the exam, the free materials, or any problems you are having with your preparation!
Madrelingua Website Caught in Godaddy.com Hacking
Late last night, when I realised last night that the brand-new, sparkling website to which I had devoted weeks of hard work over the summer of 2012 was “down”, it was hard to avoid panicking!
No website means no page views, no enquiries, no bookings and, in a few months, no students in our Italian classes.
Teachers to pay, but nobody to teach. It’s one of my worst nightmares!
Srraight away I messaged Stefi to tell her the bad news.
“What next?” she messaged back, “I can’t take any more!”
Then on to the website of our (wonderful) hosting service Synthesis . They promise a 30-minute response to problems like this, and they were true to their word.
“It’s not us. It’s your DNS – Godaddy.com has been hacked!”
When you type madrelinguaitalian.com into your browser, or click on a link in search engine like Google, your browser sends a request to a Domain Name Server (DNS) basically asking “Where do I have to go in the world to find this domain name?”
The DNS replies with the IP address (like a phone number) and your browswer “calls up” the server and downloads the files which go to make up our website.
And that was not happening. Not only for our primary site, but also for a series of other sites I run for friends, and apparently for millions of other websites all over the world.
Which, in a way, was rather comforting. I could go to bed knowing that it wasn’t just me facing economic meltdown, and so with the expectation that something would quickly be done.
Which it was. By morning Godaddy.com had restored normal service and my sites were all working again. But how fragile the balance between normality and disaster!
And a reminder of the importance of word-of-mouth. So what if our website’s down, as long as our clients are happy with the improvement in their Italian langauge skills, people will still choose our school in Bologna to study Italian!
Which reminds me, check out our new Testimonials page. If YOU have studied at Madrelingua and would like to add your comments, we’d be very pleased to hear from you.
Madrelingua Italian School Has A New Website!
Out with the old…
Way back in 2006 we created the first Madrelingua Italian School website by copying and adapting the code from the English school site which we’d paid a fortune for the year before. The result was a visual disaster, an awful mix of orange and green!
Nevertheless, students used to tell us that they chose our school because they liked the site – perhaps it was the fact that it looked so hopeless!
Since then, we’ve kept working on it, always trying to make it better, if we could. One year, a young designer from the U.S. doing an internship at our school managed to give the site a wonderful new look, without spending any money (thanks, Karen).
Other interns helped us translate the content into 15 other languages, including Thai and Chinese! Still others took photos and wrote exercises.
And I’ve personally spent many months of my life cutting and pasting bits of HTML from one page to another in an effort to make sure that the site was always updated and smart.
Over time, the site attracted a good level of traffic, and moved up the search-engine ratings so we were able to compete with other Italian schools.
But now, 6 years on from that initial experiment, www.madrelinguaitaliano.com is looking dated. What’s more, the world has changed: social networks, sharing, content created by the user, and Google’s latest changes to its ranking system, have all contributed to making the old site obsolete.
and in with the new!
Presenting…. www.madrelinguaitalian.com ! An almost identical domain, which allowed us to create a new, parallel site (you’re on the new one now!) from scratch, while leaving the old one in place until the day when we’ll finally be ready to scrap it.
Most of our users read English, so we’ve started with that language, and will gradually add others when time and resources permit.
A wonderful content management system allows us to achieve a nice visual effect with our limited resources, and has liberated me from the grunt work of coding hundreds of pages by hand. Stefi and the teachers will also be able to work on the site themselves when they need to, without needing technical skills.
So, what do you think?
Well, have a look around.. click a few links, go on! Well? What do you think? Better the new or the old? Go on, you can say what you REALLY think (gently, though).
Seriously, we’d love to get your feedback on the new site. Leave a comment to let us know if you like it or not, and why.
