Comment / Virtual new look

Its development comes on the back of a renewed push for members and I am also delighted to announce that my colleague Flo Greenland is to become our first membership manager. Flo’s role will be to drive our growth for new members and implement an ambitious membership strategy, which was agreed by our board in February. She joins our new website manager Sheridan Mossley in a substantial upgrade to our member services.

Our website was last redeveloped in 2008 and while we’ve refreshed it a few times, we were running on creaking legacy technology. Our new site is run on an industry-standard platform and gives us a lot more flexibility and I believe it reflects where the association is now. The 2008 site had a significant focus on where you could buy something. Now the focus is very definitely on what the association is saying and how it can help you in your day jobs.

Our popular news alerts feature prominently and I feel sure that many of you will choose to access this service via your mobile, on which the new site works well. We are supplementing this signposting service with more news and analysis through the week (our newly entitled ‘Top stories’) and we are also relaunching a more extensive blogging section.

As you’d expect, social media is integrated and individual twitter feeds are now visible across the different sections – in branches and our faculties, for example.  All our content is categorised, so visitors can hone in on everything to do with costing, financial management or clinical engagement, to give a few examples. Our aim is to make sure our work is as visible as possible.

We hope that you like the design – we certainly do. But the main purpose of the new site is to make our wide range of content – from events and webinars to briefings and guides to news and opinions – easy to find. And if you follow one link, we’ve tried to flag up to you directly relevant other content that you might want to be aware of.

We have a clear aim to integrate our communication channels much better. So in future we want this magazine and the website working in tandem, with the magazine highlighting additional online resources, for example. You should literally watch this space!

We aimed to make navigation of the site as intuitive as possible. It has been designed with you – the member – in mind. So let me know what you think of it as we will refine the site as we move forward ([email protected]). 

So far, implementation has gone smoothly, but like a duck swimming, there’s a lot of paddling going on beneath the surface, so bear with us if there are issues initially.

I’d like to thank my team, led by James Hood, our head of IT and e-learning. We continue to provide you with the services we think you need in this busy period, but please tell us what we should or shouldn’t do – we’ll look at anything.