The British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG)
Transforming the member experience
Founded in 1937, the British Society of Gastroenterology is a registered charity with over 3,000 members, focused on the promotion of gastroenterology and hepatology.
A leading force in British medicine, the BSG has representation within the British Royal Colleges, the Department of Health and the Government.
The objective of the new site was to grow their community by improving engagement for existing members, attracting new members’ and building the reputation of the society.
Mark (CEO of BSG) asked me to pass on his thanks for our hard work and commitment getting their new site built and launched, they've had some great feedback and are really happy! So well done everyone, if was a great team effort to deliver this large members portal on time. There were plenty of challenges but we've done a great job!
Christian Scott – Head of Project Delivery, Granite 5
Thank you for all of your help, patience and support in delivering our lovely new website, I'm sure it's going to have a positive impact on the society and for our members.
Carol Wolrich – Interim Director of Marketing, British Society of Gastroenterology
Open source architecture
BSG decided to fully embrace open source solutions over proprietary development, and choose to work with us to deliver the website design and front-end development. We worked closely alongside the existing back-end development team already working on the MS Dynamics integration.
The site is built using WordPress and has been extended using a number of leading plugins to provide features including: a membership portal, payments, recruitment gateway, events calendar, gated content, forum, knowledge hub and more.
Content and IA
We focused on delivering the best possible user experience and making it easy to extract content from deep within a complex hierarchy and significant volume of data.
By getting under the skin of the organisation at the start of the project it allowed us to ask lots of questions to help the user journey planning, and end user experience. This ensured that all critical content was sectioned off and clearly sign-posted.
During the design process we explored signposting users deeper into the site and cross-pollinating content across different specialisms.
UI design
We gently evolved the existing brand palette to produce a user interface design with a suitably trustworthy and clinical look and feel, in a clean and contemporary style.
The biggest challenge was achieving consistency between the presentation of features provided by plugins, so we carefully prioritised UI elements including typography, buttons, and grids.
We delivered an extremely flexible modular website which allows for unique and distinctive page layouts to be created easily, without the constraints of rigid page templates. The flexible modules are used to create rich landing and content pages, provide useful internal signposting, and to help navigate the deep architecture.
User experience
Helping users to efficiently self-serve content from an extensive library of guidance and documentation allows BSG to be the voice for gastroenterology and hepatology.
The sites huge volume of content is carefully presented in neat islands of data which are carefully categorised and include filtering, search and sort tools where possible.
Impact
January 2020 compared with January 2019
14%
Increase in time on site
135%
increase in organic sessions
200%
increase in total users
