McMaster University: Undergraduate Medical Program Website

The Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine is a flagship of the McMaster University Health Sciences program. Founded on an innovative philosophy to have students learn about their profession the same way doctors’ practice, students study in small and focused groups with real patient presentations and in actual clinical environments, rather than strictly through lectures or pathology. 

The School of Medicine was established in 1966 and was renamed the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine in 2004. They had grown to become one of the most successful undergraduate programs in Ontario with thousands of applicants each year vying for the coveted 203 spots for their three-year program. With a very successful admissions program in place, the undergraduate faculty was looking to improve their public-facing website so that it matched the innovative program they offered.

Having worked with several other departments within McMaster Health Sciences, the Undergraduate Medical Program approached us in 2015 to help them reimagine their website.

The goal of this project was to build a new website that better reflected the McMaster MD Program brand by not only highlighting their excellence in academics, but also the greater contributions the faculty makes to the medical and academic community through research and policies. 

We sought to do more than simply design a visually appealing new website for McMaster MD Undergrad. We worked with several stakeholders and cross-functional departments within McMaster to reimagine the entire online experience. We took great care to hear the concerns and goals of each of the constituents and develop a new architecture that better met the needs of educators, researchers, and students alike. 

To ease administration and encourage regular updating we implemented a robust and easy to administer content management system. Site administrators can now manage all points of the website from content and page creation to video and photo galleries and document management internally. 

Using the robust and enterprise platform, we created custom modules for their faculty, news, events, campuses, programs, and resources that enabled us to seamlessly interlink related content and make for a more meaningful user-experience. We also incorporated McMaster’s custom imagery and brand elements to create layouts that funnel users to the information that is relevant to them. We continue to work with the department to enhance and update their site to meet the evolving needs of their stakeholders.