By David Teisler, CAE
There are a million ways to structure a website, and for an organization that serves multiple constituencies, the challenges multiply, especially when those audiences don't necessarily intersect.
Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) initially created a website that organized itself by audience: members; professionals who aren't members; students; and lay people.
This makes a lot of sense, because we, as association people, have a sense of who we are talking to, and, for example, we can posit all material of interest to students in the student section. Perfect, right?
But this approach also has pitfalls, because visitors must decide:
- Who am I?
- What if I'm transitioning?
Transition is a huge part of half ABCT’s membership. Many of our students are looking towards the day when they're out of school and hanging up a shingle or, for our researchers, getting their first K grant funded, or moving from a teaching assistant to an associate professor spot. Moreover, ABCT includes in our students category those who have already received their terminal degree, but are in post-doctoral or internship programs. These classifications muddy the waters, especially for those students looking to get information to help them be better professionals.
When we revised our website we changed the focus from who to what, and rather than look at who was visiting, we tried instead to anticipate what they wanted to know. Click on the link above to see our site as it appears today and look at the text in the horizontal bar.
We designed our site to account for seven main areas if what visitors wanted to know:
- About ABCT: Information about the organization;
- Get Information: General information about Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and the disorders;
- Find Help: I need to see a therapist;
- Resources: More specific questions to help specific groups;
- Journals;
- Conventions; and
- Members.
The horizontal bar is dense, with the seven categories, se we added several other elements that we want to highlight:
- Join;
- Donate;
- Find a CBT Therapist;
- Vote (this is time-specific; for much of the year it highlights our convention); and
- Twitter feed.
ABCT uses visuals to attract attention to up to four different pages. Look at the central image and the four rotating boxes below.
We try to replicate the look of our homepage on each of the seven focus, such as in the example here.
On the left hand navigation bar, we drill deeper, and showcases the what by anticipating the questions visitors might have with succinct headers:
- Student Resources;
- Job Bank:
- Teacher Resources;
- Research Resources:
- Clinical Resources.
Let's drill down on the teaching section. Within the Teaching page, we further delineate elements needed for the classroom:
Within the Teaching page, we further delineate elements needed for the classroom:
- Syllabi;
- Slides;
- Videos and Webcasts;
- CBT Medical Educator Directory;
- Teaching Exercises, Demonstrations, and Assignments.
If you then look at the Syllabi page, for example, you will note that every page also has
- The top header to return to the homepage;
- Find a CBT Therapist;
- Glossary.
Within the Glossary section we list an ever-expanding set of topical issues that relate to each letter in the alphabet, so that A includes Anxiety, Autism, Assertiveness, Anger, etc.
By revamping ABCT’s website to focus on what instead of who, we enhanced the online experience for visitors to our site, and we won NYSAE’s 2012 Digital Excellence Award!
*This article is based on a presentation at NYSAE’s April Technology Summit.
David Teisler, CAE, is Director of Communications and Deputy Executive Director, Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and Vice Chair of NYSAE’s Technology Committee. He can be reached at 212-647-1890 or teisler@abct.org.