SGA

I loved being a part of the University of Kentucky's Student Government Association (SGA). It taught me a lot that I hadn't been exposed to in my engineering curriculum. However, our site was terrible. It was a wordpress site that suffered years of mismanagement and neglect. By the time I took over as Directory of Technology, the site was unusably slow and usually hacked. When SGA's advisor got an email from the dean of a college at a different university saying that our site was redirecting people to explicit content, I knew it was time for a groundup rebuild.

SGA landing page screenshot — The landing view for the SGA homepage. We wanted an easy way for curious students to get in touch. We decided it would be best to have an email entry. We've collected lots of emails! We noticed some spam, so we honeypotted the field and fixed the problem.

SGA funding page screenshot — SGA gives a lot of money to student orgs. We have legislation that orchestrates the process. We wanted to help students understand the ways to get funding and the types of funding we have to help them get the best for their organization!

I wanted to address the root cause of the underlying problem: the people previously responsible for the site weighed it down with plugins and widgets. Collaborating with the executive team, we decided that the new site would have minimal features. No calendars, no image carousels, no blogs. We identified a number of use cases and derived our features from there.

Students rely on SGA for a lot of resources, some they don't even realize we have! I think the most common resource is funding. SGA gives a lot of money to on campus orgs and the process can be pretty confusing. We wanted to clearly lay out the process and types of funding we have.

Since our legislation outlines the ways to be elected and run a campaign as well as how to receive funding from SGA, we needed to make all of those resources easily accessible. We built the Legislation page and a way admins can upload new versions of legislation from a custom CMS.

Students generally didn't know all of the services we provide, many of which are super useful. We wanted a way to showcase them and provide ways for students to get in touch with the people that run them.

SGA legislation page screenshot — Our legislation affects how students can get funding, participate in elections, and behave as a member of SGA. On our previous site, our legislation was constantly out of date and hard to find. We fixed this! Admins can update the legislation versions from our custom CMS, keeping every student up to date.

SGA executive page screenshot — There are lots of people in SGA. We wanted to make sure that anybody would be able to see who's representing them easily and quickly. The profiles are managed through the CMS and can be readily edited or deleted.

Students vote for their representation every spring. When things come up that affect students, they want to be able to get in contact with the people that can fix the issues. We created profiles complete with headshots, position titles, and contact information for everybody in SGA. You can find these under the Branches tab.

We wanted students to feel like they were able to join our organization, so we needed a way to collect emails from curious visitors. We put the email form directly on the home page so it was impossible to miss.

The site took the majority of a semester to build. We used Symfony and created a CMS, accessible for non-technical admins, that could easily manage all of the content on the site.

The feedback was immediate and kind. We collected dozens of emails and got more people involved than we had before. Students use the site to get information on our services. People have downloaded meeting minutes and legislation. Administrators were thrilled. It was a big win. Currently the site is maintained by Hayden Free, who is doing a fantastic job.

SGA records page screenshot — SGA is required by *law* to maintain records of its meetings. We created a way that students can easily get the most recent minutes for whatever committee they want!