At our Winter Board Meeting in Pierre, the subject of our current SDADA website came up. The discussion that followed lead to a decision that we need to upgrade/overhaul our website. Ryan Junek and Travis Vesely volunteered to lead that effort.

They will be gathering information on developers, functionality options and other factors that will push us toward a better site. If you have any input, please contact them.

While this may require a multi-phase roll-out, we will be start by focusing on several areas we discussed at our meeting. 

First, the website must be mobile friendly. Our current site is not and we know that between 50-60% of users access our dealership website via mobile devices. For many, if they cannot access via mobile, they just won't use it. There is no reason to believe that our association website is any different.

Our website need to be the primary conduit through which our members access our association. We have identified communication as one of the great challenges for SDADA. The website must be a tool for us in overcoming that communication gap and it must be more user friendly. 

We want to offer additional functionality that our current site cannot. For example, we want to offer you opt-in text alerts or updates for limited legislative and regulatory issues, video resources for both training and promotional purposes, expanded legislative and regulatory information, etc.

The discussion we had was broad and as the meeting progressed, we found other functions with which a more robust website would assist. We will be using other state automobile associations sites as models for ours.

I'm looking forward to this upgrade. I want to thank Ryan and Travis for their leadership with this project. We will keep you updated.