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