3w.bbainsa.no: A story of success!

Written by Hernán Aros | 01 January 2010
Posted in Articles - Technology

After the election of the current BBA Board on April 2009 there was just one little problem:  the board had no IT/Web Manager.  Nobody applied for the position.  It was then when I decided to apply and present some ideas to the new board.  To say the thruth, I don't think that someone else applied at the same time as me, so the desicion was fairly easy, I got the position and a big challenge: "to develop the new BBA Website".

From the beginning It was clear for me that if we wanted to produce some impact on the community at BI, we may not use the  very expensive and not so usefull framework used by SBIO and some other organizations (Idium).  After receiving a brief introduction to it I was convinced:  It simply wasn't good enough for us.  

The options on my mind where the ones to your left: Wordpress or Joomla; being the second one the chosen alternative.  But that was just the starting point, the real challenge started when, after collecting ideas from the rest of the BBA Board, I had to try to make them a reality, especially those that came from Tea .   Some of the collected ideas were:  a forum, the possibility of interacting as a community (Facebook-like), pictures and video galleries, posibility to upload/download files (pdf, doc, etc.), a platform for events, etc.   As you can see, some of the ideas became a reality and some have not been/will not be implemented, at least for now.

During the recent Christmas holidays I made some changes to the design, I worked on improving the performance and making general layout changes.   All this is to prepare everything for the next IT/Web Manager.   The website is much simpler to maintain now than before, and anyone (with a bit of patience) will be able to take care of it during the upcoming years.

The last milestone is to open the forum for all the BBA students.  We are very close to that day, we are just taking care of having the right information about the current students, so the risk of having problems is minimmum.  We are definitively opening the forum this January.

But you can be asking yourself, but what does it make it a succesful project?  The following information will tell you why...

 Statistics (1 Aug. - 13 Dec. 2009)

• We had 3218 visits from 44 different countries .
• The month with the larger amount of visitors was October with 1065 visits .
• There were published 115 different posts, considering information content, news and articles.
• We accounted for more than 200 fans of our new Facebook Page.

New Features and Services for BBA and InSA

As mentionated before, many features were implemented on our new webpage, some of them were extensively used and some will be fully functional starting this semester. Some of the feature are:

• Forms: One of the key features of the website is the posibility of creating forms, allowing people to register for events and even pay for them online. This has made things easier for both users and our Event Manager, Anastasia.
• Events: We have an special platform for events. This allows us to publish the events in an ordered way, providing as much information as possible; even a map is displayed to make the venue easier to find.
• Contact Information: The contact information is clearly displayed on our website. The name, position and phone number of every member of the BBA and InSA boards are showed. You can also contact us directly from our website using the contact form provided.
• Forum: Since last semester we have been struggling to be able to give access to everyone to our Forum. The Forum itself is up and running since a long time ago, but the students haven't got access to it yet. That will change very soon!

These are just some of the statistics and features of our website. There are also tons of academic information specially prepared by Tea, information about different student groups at BI, pictures and more!

The invitation is to visit it, use it and give us your feedback, to make it more attractive and usefull for you!