Healthydebate.ca is a vibrant, expertly curated, community-driven website aimed at fomenting active discussions by community leaders, activists, healthcare professionals, and engaged members of the Canadian public. The scope is healthcare in Canada, and the topics are broad and varied.
Zeitguys was engaged to bring this social media project from the pages of the research grant to full online reality. Our deliverables included:
- Information architecture and UX design
- Visual design and WordPress theme customization
- Plugin research, implementation and customization
- Custom plugin and widget development
- Project management and testing
- Documentation and end-user training
From Blog to Social Media Platform
The really exciting part of the project was taking the raw materials of the WordPress platform and crafting them into a usable and compelling social media destination that engages the site visitor at every turn. We supplemented WordPress’ already powerful commenting system with approval ratings, and also added rankings, polls, social media controls and popularity filters throughout the site all aimed squarely at getting even the casual visitor involved in the feedback process.
By carefully selecting and leveraging key add-ons, and with a healthy dose of home-grown coding, we adapted WordPress’ blog-based technology into something much more sophisticated and interactive.
Rankings and Ratings
Each article has a visitor-defined ranking score that is generated by allowing any reader of the article to select from a 5-star rating. Each visitor may only rate the same article once. The process is easy and casual (no registration or verification is required) and so user adoption of this behaviour is high.
The user commenting system also benefits from its own “thumbs up / thumbs down” rating system. Coupled with a custom popularity filtering tab, this democratizes the commenting process and ensures that the most useful and well thought-out comments bubble to the top.
Survey Says…
The next tool that encourages user participation is the polling / survey system. Polls can be easily created and added to any article – some articles contain multiple polls. Users select from multiple-choice answers and only see the poll results once they themselves have participated in the poll (or the poll expires).
A site-wide “featured poll” is also available in the ubiquitous sidebar, and is often used by the site curators to solicit feedback about what the next topics or articles should be.
The Social Scene
These days, no website is complete without the standard suite of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking links. In addition to these links, we built in a tight integration with Facebook, leveraging the Facebook API, and added a comprehensive sharing tool that covers nearly every current mode of digital communication from email to digg and beyond.
But wait, there’s more…
We could go on and on about this project, talking about how we implemented an integrated opt-in mailing and newsletter system, user feedback forms, easy flash and media embedding, metrics and analytics and a host of other customizations that make the day-to-day administration of the content straightforward.
But we won’t. Instead, we will just encourage you to jump on over to healthydebate.ca and join the debate!