Small student association’s often have a hard time competing with the bigger ones when it comes to recruiting new members. On one hand, the big associations are much more visible both in the media and during introduction weeks. On the other hand, the image that most of the bigger associations create of themselves in the media (by way of occasional hazing accidents, misogynistic scandals, substance abuse, and violent behavior) often gets transferred to the smaller associations as well.

This is a shame, because those smaller associations (and naturally some of the bigger ones as well) often provide a very open, inclusive, and safe environment for students to develop themselves personally, professionally, and socially during their studies. It has therefore always been a challenge for my own association, AEGEE-Leiden, to get our message across to current and prospective students.

Prior work on the website

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit during my board year at AEGEE-Leiden, this was made even more difficult, as we could only reach out to students through online channels. At the time, the AEGEE-Leiden website was built using Weebly, a website builder that already at the time was feeling outdated. While I tried to make the best of it by creating a more consistent design, I still found the website too cluttered and Weebly too restrictive in its possibilities to make a durable improvement.

Making the new website

Fast-forwarding to the summer of 2024, about six months before our contract with Weebly would have to be renewed, there was a call for a team to build a new website for AEGEE-Leiden. I became the chair of this team of six members, and we kicked off in September. We really started from scratch: who is our target audience, what do we want to tell them, and how do we want to tell it? We drew inspiration from other student associations for this, while looking for design ideas on a broad range of websites. We had meetings almost every week, and spent the first three months brainstorming, prototyping, and discussing. By December, we had an overview of the pages we wanted to include, the content we wanted to show, and the design we wanted to use.

Next, it was time to actually build the site. Originally, we intended to use WordPress for this, but eventually we chose to use Hugo, as it gave us a bit more flexibility (especially regarding styling, for which we used TailwindCSS) and because site content is easier to maintain with Hugo. Together with two other team members, we developed the website at a quick pace, while two others gathered images and wrote content, and the last team member took care of some more UI design. Mid-February, the website went live, although we still had some tweaks to perform regarding performance and SEO. You can check out the website of AEGEE-Leiden yourself to see the result.

Reflection

I am very proud of the result. The website is much more modern, clean, and easy to navigate than the old one. The navigation menu went from containing an astounding 35 pages to just 11, making it much easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for. I took extra care in making the site performant, accessible, SEO-friendly, and in particular mobile-friendly.

While there are certainly some things that could have gone better, I am very happy with what we have achieved in such a short time. Hopefully, this new website manages (along with all other efforts of the association) to convey the message that AEGEE-Leiden is a great place to be for students who want to develop themselves in a fun, open, and adventurous environment.