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As an organization, the website is the backbone of our project. It is the platform on which learning resources are shared. Putting it simply “No website no SDUGS”.
It had to be simple & easily navigated, without disturbing organization, thus we established the “Three clicks rule” which implies: “Any content can be reached in three mouse clicks from the homepage”. For example:
- *1st click*: Learning Resources
- *2nd click*: Endodontic Diagnosis
- *3rd click*: Click to Download
The design evolves around learning resources by facilitating finding the needed and not distracting the viewer with advertisement or unrelated information.
We don’t want to bombard our audience with information they consider insignificant and that’s how we built it and how we built our content notification approach via our official twitter account (@SDUGSorg) on which we only tweet about published learning resources.
As for the blog, it targets those who are interested in the journey of Saudi Dental Undergrads Society. It has its own twitter account (@sdugs_blog) so that people are not forced to receive notifications for blogs from the official twitter account when they only care about new published learning resources.
At first we paid a free-lance local website designer to build the website; however, before launching the site we switched to the website builder “Squarespace”. We paid 300% more than what we should have if we would have chosen Squarespace from the beginning (our first mistake) but it was the best decision we made.
We need statistics for the site itself and for the published learning resources. Squarespace offers statistics but we need comprehensive ones as those of Google Analytics. It’s easy to connect Google Analytics to Squarespace but it’s not easy to configure Google Analytics to protect the statistical data from spamming bots (but that’s another topic for a future blog).
An example from our Google Analytics: Sessions during Final Exams Period (May 6th: Final CCC Exam for the Class of 2010 at King Abdulaziz University Faculty of Dentistry)
Fortunately, Squarespace enables us to reach our goals regardless of our limited experience in building websites. With that being said, it isn't a piece of cake.
Author: Yazan Aljohani