The Challenge

Health professionals and their patients have been benefiting from the world-class training facility at the Skills Centre for Health Sciences since it officially opened in April 2008 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The only facility of it’s kind East of Montreal, the Skills Centre provides students, residents and staff a simulated learning environment in which they can perfect their skills before entering the OR.

Our challenge was to design a content rich site geared towards a wide range of allied and non-allied health care professionals—one that would quickly communicate the breadth of the Skills Centre offering.

The Solution

From ophthalmology labs to critical airway sessions to surgical procedures, the Skills Centre offers an extremely diverse range of courses, workshops and labs. The site seeks to capture this diversity via a photo-intensive design coupled with a flexible featured content area and homepage layout that surfaces a wide range of site content. Skillscentre.ca was built in WordPress to allow for effortless client-side maintenance.  Tools to allow for easy publishing of the Skills Centre’s upcoming events and courses were integrated into the backend, with an eye to future enhancements such as a booking engine. Additional custom development includes the homepage Javascript gallery that exposes and hides content at the user’s request. There are additional custom WordPress backend components under the hood aimed at connecting health professionals and medical innovators that will be deployed over time.