WE! ARE! LIVE!
After 18 months of vetting design companies to find the perfect fit, another six months of bidding out to sign a contract, another two months of planning and tweaks before setting a design, another two months of connecting all the parts and finalizing but here we are!
Late Sunday, after pulling a 30 hour work week to make sure all relevant content was migrated over to our new website and our new eCommunity, we quietly went live. The formal company announcement for the site isn't going to be until next week so we are still in a state of soft launch right now. Our volunteer groups and hardcore member base are on the site and reporting back any bugs and issues they are finding.
Of course, I can sit here and talk all day about how happy and how amazingly drastic the redesign was, but why not show you?
OK, before I start this monster post I need to thank the geniuses behind our new site: Vanguard Technologies. If you're a small to mid-level association, these are the cats you want in your corner. They specialize in associations and know our processes better than anyone. They know the technology we use, the software we prefer and the budget restraints we are constantly fighting. Words can't express how happy I am with how everything turned out. Our site is full of engagement triggers now, and it will be interesting to see from an analytics standpoint how this helps over the coming months/years.
First let's take a look at our old homepage
No kind words on this one. It's narrow margins, cluttered lines, where the hell are you supposed to look exactly? Where should you go first? What for the love of God is going on?! Do I even admit that this is an improvement on the homepage compared to what it looked like almost three years ago when I started? No, I don't want credit for any of this.
Now, take a look at the new and improved homepage
So clean, simple and easy to navigate. The calls to action are right there: uncluttered and well defined. Then at the bottom is my favorite part: the feeds. Constantly updating news feeds with our members' press releases, a Twitter account from our three most active and important feeds, a customized per each member news feed from our eCommunity and an events feed. The eCommunity feed is awesome. When you aren't logged in, you see a feed from our open general forum. If you're logged in, you see a news feed from your volunteer group subscriptions. . .it's beyond awesome.
Still riding high, let's take a trip back to one of our old secondary pages
White on gray and once again a jumbled mess that is far from easy to read.
Now that page new and improved
Easier to read, better organized and displayed with calls to action on the left (ShareThis links) and the right (eCommunity participation)
Probably one of the more frustrating things to me was the newsletter module we had in place on the old site. Through our old CMS (a custom built train wreck that was filled with incomplete code) we would input the articles, it would format them, slap a header on it and poop it on the page like this
Do you want to read that? Like how it runs off the page? What if I told you not all the links always worked either?
Our new news module through the new CMS (Sitefinity) lets us do the same input and after some development from our web solutions company we get this
Finally, the heart of our association, the eCommunity. Before it was static. A place to get information and go. It served its purpose very well (and was very well received by our members), but as we evolved, we needed something more robust than this
That was the intro page, you then would click through to the discussion forums that were clunky and not the easiest to navigate. The other main issue was setting up a subscription to a thread if you wanted to get email alerts. Example: I want to follow a thread involving our annual conference in the Communications Committee thread. I would first go to the committee and adjust my alerts for them (frequency of emails, type of email alerts preferred) then I would go to my digests and subscribe to the actual discussion thread (once again to adjust the frequency of emails and type of email alerts preffered). Make sense? It did after a while, but many of our members chose to not stick around long enough to get it.
Now our new eCommunity (
Higher Logic) pulls directly from our Avectra member database to pre-populate member profiles, committees, etc. and resembles an eCommunity/LinkedIn hybrid
From the homepage you can see some LinkedIn similarities (most notably the profile completion box in the top right corner). Another cool thing is you're awarded points for doing different things in the eCommunity (setting your profile, creating a community or discussion group, posting in a thread, uploading documents to the resource library, adding to our wiki, etc.). I'm proud of the fact I'm currently 4,000 points ahead of everyone else. I will retain my title of eCommunity Overlord as long as humanly possible.
The engagement levels on the eCommunity are huge. There are so many ways to be involved. It autocreates networks based on what you post in your profile. From there you can add contacts based on anything from your current city to job title to personal interests (I'm not the only one that enjoys digital strategy and distance running!). Anyone can create a blog post or upload a document or entire document library. We can rate posts and discussions and the higher the ratings, the higher the user's point total goes. We're still working on incentives and digital ribbons for this part, but the sky's the limit.
OK, enough of the love fest, time to get back and keep this party moving.
I'm Joe.