After being selected to build a new website for the College of Dental Hygienists of Ontario, CDHO made clear that they wanted the best website features and functionality that a regulatory college can have. C(Group conducted a needs analysis to detail the various features a new site would require to truly provide the public and registrants with the College tools that would meet their needs. We worked to outline pain points about their existing site and opportunities to future-proof the build of the new site. The College of Dental Hygienists of Ontario needed a website that offered their audiences a much more efficient and organized way to access information. Their new site would also need to bring forward the new CDHO brand language and attributes.
CDHO Website Key Objectives
- Organized sensibly from an information architecture standpoint so a user may quickly access
the information they require. - Possess a user interface that supports efficient navigation and digestion of content.
- Be visually appealing and project the College’s new brand language and attributes.
- Work FOR the College through effective search engine optimization (SEO).
- Utilize WordPress to integrate a CMS that meets best practices.
- Be fully responsive to all screen sizes so content displays optimally on mobile devices.
- Is fully accessible and meets WCAG 2.0 (AA) standards.
- Can connect users seamlessly via redirect with other functional software such as the member
self-service portal.
C(Group worked through a number of conceptual designs that prioritized the ability to have a neat, organized and optimized responsive layout. Utilizing the branding guide provided, C(Group narrowed down the concepts to land on a design that embodies airy, clean and timeless attributes of the new CDHO brand. C(Group built templates that offer interchangeable feature areas for high-priority content to be presented both on the homepage but also throughout the site. As the College rewrote all the website content, C(Group collaborated to reorganize the content into an updated Information Architecture that removed a large amount of the content clutter that made the previous site overwhelming. Careful consideration was taken to create custom content formatting styles that would offer creative and consumable ways for CDHO to present their freshly rewritten and translated content.
One of the College’s most important tools, the “Knowledge Network”, was identified as a critical tool used by dental hygienists to reference medical guidance on intersectional medical conditions that may impact their care to their patients. This tool was in need of functional improvement to ensure quick and easy searching of conditions, improved ease of use within the documentation content as well as a better mobile experience for dental hygienists accessing this tool from their mobile phones while in the field.
C(Group’s functional design of the new Knowledge Network employed a multi-optional search offering users the ability to search by disease group, first letter of condition or by keyword. The design offered a neat and organized way for users to scroll through conditions and easily click through to Fact Sheets and Advisories on the condition. This design neatly reorganizes to the best responsive layout for all screen sizes making the search functions as well as the results easy to navigate for users.
Within the Fact Sheets and Advisories, a layout designed to offer an easy-on-the-eye way to identify headings and sub-headings within extensive medical content was created by C(Group. Additionally, a side navigation that offers users the ability to skip to heading sections to more quickly access content relevant to their needs provides users with the best possible experience using this important tool.
C(Group prioritized creating an administrative dashboard that offers the College the most streamlined option for uploading content into the Fact Sheets and Advisories by building a custom post type that ensures that staff do not need to complete any layout formatting and that no repetitive content needs to be unnecessarily re-entered for each Factsheet and Advisory. C(Group built this site with complete AODA WCAG 2.0 AA compliance and utilizing best practices for SEO.
The website also offers a French version of the site to users and a specialized custom website search field which has been optimized to provide more optimized results than the standard WordPress search to further ensure users can quickly and efficiently find and access the content they need.
The new CDHO website combines all of the best features of a regulatory college website with completely unique and customized special features that expand the College website from being purely a communication tool to being a functional tool for the College’s registrants to be used on any device, and as a functional tool to further the College’s mandate.
