Having been a big source of consternation amongst members for its poor performance, I created a brand new WA music teacher directory for the WA Music Teachers’s Association, launched at the end of 2023.
The original directory was a subsection within a Joomla website, and the teacher profiles generally did not rank well in searches, unless you specifically searched for the teachers name plus WAMTA! The ability to search by location was broken, so you could not search in neighbouring suburbs. Complaints about it were regular.
I created a dedicated site in WordPress with its own optimised domain name, testing out a variety of directories before deciding on one that I felt worked best for WAMTA’s needs. As a comparison here are the old and new home pages of the Teacher Directory:
And these were the directory listings, first as they appeared originally (in 2021), and then after I’d been able to tweak them as much as I could while still in Joomla (in 2022) to make them a little more appealing and useful, compared to the new one:
The directory has a significantly improved search functionality, with a variety of filters to help narrow down options. The teacher profiles are nice and clean and much more useful!
There’s also new fields which help find teachers who travel on a mobile basis (a common query that couldn’t be answered with the old website) and teach online.
The site is responsive, so that it can be accessed on a mobile phone. And with my SEO expertise baked in right from the outset, WAMTA teachers very quickly started showing up on the first page of google searches.
Visit it at: https://musicteacherswa.org.au