Tutor Ultrasound

My mom is a career-long ultrasound technician, and she started tutoring students for their registry/accreditation exams. She needed a website so that students could find her.

She started tutoring back in 2014 and I had recently started learning how to build websites in college. Naturally, I built her a website.

Timeline

1 week

December 25 – 31, 2014

Context

My mom is an ultrasound technician who wanted to expand her services beyond out-patient care by tutoring students who are studying to become ultrasound technicians. As a career-long ultrasound technician, she has a lot of experience taking registry exams to become certified, so she focuses on helping students study for their exams.

Problem

format_quote I don't know how to effectively study for registry exams.

There is a lot of complex material that is difficult to navigate. Having taken dozens of registry exams, my mom is an expert at finding the best studying and learning materials. She knows how to use the materials to her advantage to maximize her success.

format_quote I can't figure out a study regiment that works, so I keep failing the exams!

It's difficult for students to stay motivated during the exam preparation process, and since the exams are very hard, students will likely fail if they don't put all of their focus on studying and preparing. My mom has developed a study regiment that has kept her motivated and passing exams for over 30 years. She possesses a lot of valuable knowledge about the registry exam preparation process.

format_quote I don't know where to find a tutor.

Not many people become ultrasound technicians, and even fewer decide to tutor, so no one knows where to look. A website was decided to be the best solution to getting my mom's name and tutoring services out there. We also decided that distributing flyers at nearby schools where students can study to be ultrasound technicians would help with customer outreach.

Process

Design and Development

Ultrasound students have enough complexity to worry about with their studies and profession, so the website had to be simple. Being a site for people to find my mom as a tutor, it had to advertise why students should hire her. Given those two things, I build the site from the ground up to fit her needs.

Analytics

Aside from running Google Analytics to monitor her website, I decided to implement a click-tracking system to track how visitors to the site navigate through it.

There are three pages: Home, About, and Contact. On the Home page there are individual links to the About and Contact pages; on the About page, there is a link to the Contact page; there are no links to any of the other pages. At the top of each page is the global navigation bar with links to all three pages. I wanted to track which links users click to navigate her site. Do they read the full Home page, then go to the About page, and then finally the Contact page? — this is how the flow of the site is designed. Or have they found another way of navigating? As the main goal is getting people to the Contact page, it's important to know how users get there.

Interestingly, in looking at how users click through to the Contact page:

From this data it can be deduced that the majority of users read the top of the Home page and decide that they want to Contact my mom, or perhaps they don't see the unique link when they make that decision so they get there via the navigation bar.

Advertising and SEO

To get as high in search engine results as possible, I customized the site's meta tags and utilized Google Ad Words. I also did research and found that Google preferences mobile-friendly websites in their results, so I made sure that the responsiveness of the site had no issues. I also found that Google preferences websites linked to a Google+ account, so I set one up.

Next Steps

Given that the site was completed, I made updates with content changes as requested. As my mom's tutoring continued, she received more testimonials and that we added to the site.

We've since taken down our website, tutorultrasound.com, but I still have the code if you're curious to learn more.

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