Website Report 2008-12

The People involved

P Kempthorne New Zealand Webmaster
Pedro Ibarra Colombo Webmaster elect.
Tansel Tiknaz Australia Web site developer
Ruth Hooper UK Edits events and committee databases
Richard Hughes UK Editor in Chief of Anaesthesia Tutorial of the Week
Bruce McCormick UK Editor in Chief of Update in Anaesthesia
Hwang Nian Chih Singapore Manager of SQPC pages

The Upgrade of the Website

At the 2008 WCA in Cape Town the Executive Committee agreed that money should be invested in upgrading the website to a more complicated operating system that would allow more flexibility and easier navigation around the increasing number of functions that the website was being asked to fulfil. This was undertaken within budget thanks in part to the generosity of Tansel Tiknaz of Expert Web Development and Design, who has always been very generous towards the WFSA.

The site upgrade gave an additional way of navigating with three lists of quick links to various parts of the site from the bottom of the home page. This makes it easier to find the more frequently used parts of such a large website.

The website is in fact three joined together. The parent site is anaesthesiologists.org (WFSA) and grafted on to that are two other sites for Anaesthesia Tutorial of the Week (ATOTW) and Update in Anaesthesia (Update). The latter two work in a different way that is more suited to rapid uploading of large files. The setting up of the whole site with the introduction of the two publications from the Publication Committee went very smoothly thanks to the attention to detail paid by the two Editors-in-Chief. Some well-timed international Skype conferences with Tansel had it all up and running.

Usage

The number of people accessing the site as increased over the four years since the revision. Given that anaesthesiologists.org is a membership portal/website and caters to a very specific subset of internet users the increase in numbers is excellent. The key to this increase has been the frequent update of content such as events, news, ATOTW and Update.

Comparing the first six months since the site was revised with the last three months four years later, we can get an idea of progress. The number of times a page is viewed by a person has doubled for the WFSA site. ATOTW and Update both get more page views than the main site and the number for ATOTW has tripled and Update has doubled.

Tansel Tiknaz predicts numbers for the events and news sections on WFSA and ATOTW and Update websites will keep growing at this rate. One thing we haven't focused on is taking the content to the users and engaging them. We put all the content onto our sites and they read it only if they come to the website. If we want to increase the page views and visitors even further Tansel suggests we try other channels like eNewsletters and Twitter where anaesthesiologists subscribe to get little teasers of news, tutorials, articles and they click on links to come back to the website to read the full text. Using such tools will increase the number of visits and page views. We have already looked at setting up an eNewsletter but at the time there was a lot going on and it needed to wait until the secretariat was better positioned to begin this. We have recently registered twitter accounts for each of the three parts of the website. The next task will be to begin to use these.

Costs

The website is staying within its annual budget of $5000 except for the costs of Pledge Connect which runs the payment portal for donations, member society subscriptions and Lifebox payments.  A fee of 2.42% of each transaction is paid to Pledge Connect. As the income that is passed through this portal increases so does the payment to Pledge Connect and this appears as an expenditure on the website budget. In 2011 to September, with this with credit card fees amounted to $2,120.20 which more than accounts for the $1731.50 over-expenditure on the website budget that occurred in that year. The income passed through the portal during this period was $214,333.68 and of this $189,229.18 was for Lifebox.

Download a pdf of income and expenses for the website.

Translation into Languages other than English

The website Content Management System has the capability for translation into foreign languages. We have a small amount of the content in French, Spanish and Chinese and I would like to thank those anaesthetists who without hesitation answer my requests for translation into languages other than English. With Pedro Ibarra taking over the running of the site following the WCA this year, I would think we can look forward to a much more comprehensive coverage in Spanish. The next step would be to seek out a suitable French and a suitable Chinese anaesthesiologist to translate the site into these languages. These anaesthesiologists would need to have full administrative rights to the site to achieve this. All that would be required of them would after notification that new content has been added to the site, prepare a translation and upload it into the translation panel of the appropriate page.

The future

There will continue to be more need for development. The website has now become an anchor for the activities of the WFSA. This will become more and more so as time goes on. It is our window to the world and more organisations are coming to us seeking inclusion on our website because they see it as important and they see the WFSA as important in global medicine. The step out into twitter will be of use to many anaesthetists but we must remain mindful of the fact that many potential users of the site are unlikely to ever have a smart phone or a twitter account and a downloadable pdf may be much more use than a tweet.

Thank you

The website is very much a collaborative effort. I would like to thank all those who make it work so well. Tansel Tiknaz is a tireless and patient guide through a field in which I am not expert. Ruth Hooper keeps everyone on track and updates the Events pages and keeps the Committee Member and National Society databases current. The editors and contributors of Anaesthesia Tutorial of the Week and Update in Anaesthesia are creating one of the best anaesthesia educational resources in the world. All this is very humbling and I am proud to have been a part of it.

Peter Kempthorne

Webmaster