Our new website – behind the scenes
The ICG website is an integral part of the way our organisation works. Rather like an iceberg – only a tenth of the functionality is visible. By providing the membership mechanism as well as supporting our advertisers, it saves our organisation a great deal of money.
Our website was a number of years old and members were telling us that while it was functional, it was also beginning to look tired and old. As the new Webmaster, I also rapidly discovered that the limitations of the technology – which had been state of the art when implemented – meant that we were struggling to support a lot of apparently straightforward features. It was hard to add new sections or even a sponsor’s logo, for example. There was a lot of very useful content on the site, but it had often become hard to locate. The Find a Consultant feature, one of the most heavily used parts of the site, also needed to be much more flexible and up to date.
We needed to transform the site, making it more usable, expanding the functionality, and keeping everything in working order. Those who had been working on the marketing initiatives since early in 2010 – notably Lesley Thompson, Andrew Smith, Frank Winter and Martin Hollis were joined by Mary Leslie, Midge Clayton and Alison Lyon, in contributing to many aspects of getting the website from initial ideas to the final form.
A rather busy six months
We appointed a joint team to help us in January: Keen as Mustard Limited to work on the look and feel of the site, including the new branding, and Dthree – our existing web team to implement the design and undertake the tricky task of porting all our existing data and administrative functionality across to the new site. Our aim was to end up with a site that had a modern look and feel, that had much better functionality and which our members and customers would enjoy using and visiting. Lesley Thompson worked tirelessly on the design briefs while I project managed and edited.
By the beginning of April we pretty much had the look and feel in place –and Mark at Dthree had created the grey site – the framework we were to work with. Mark had also developed a completely new Content Management System; no longer would we have to work in HTML and we could add images, downloads and links easily. Rather than the limited space of the old site – we now had a much more flexible clean white space to work with.
Between April and the end of May we built the structure of the site. As we moved along we found elements of the design needed tweaking, for example initially the logo was too small and we had much wordier labels on the navigation at the top. Working closely together we debated, tested and adjusted many components. Mark was able to import the entire Find a Consultant dataset from the old site, as well as all the membership and supplier information, and all the old content. I spent quite a lot of time reorganising the content into more sensible and accessible locations, and testing many links.
Our key date was the launch of the Insight Show on 29th June – no pressure then! We needed the site to be up and running to demonstrate to potential clients, partners and new members. During June we worked closely with Midge Clayton to get the interim Connect elements in place. We needed to start to update the Find a Consultant engine, but also have enough new members with information added to the site by 29th June. We tested various options during the early part of June, adding one simple new front end question – and almost half the membership added their new data in the week before the Insight Show. In addition we had added the free text search box – which we have continued to improve since thanks to member feedback.
We were ready to roll on the morning of 29th June – and our new site had hundreds of visits in the two days of the Insight Show, attracting many positive comments.
We have many new features on the site – some visible to users, others just to those of us who manage the site. From my point of view having much better management of the content is a real boon. We also have the new Members’ page, with a built-in facility that enables us to feature new content quickly and easily. And the new Content Management System means we can create new areas easily and add a ticker on the landing page whenever we want to. For members and advertisers there are new features to help you display your businesses, including automated links to Linked In and Twitter.
It has not all been perfect; the ability to update information much more easily also rapidly exposed a number of unexpected glitches, which Mark has managed to address.
What next?
Our next task is to move the Connect engine to version 3. We have a number of additional fields we want to add, as well as revising the slightly odd current categories within the engine. Our aim is to complete the design of this phase and launch these new Connect features in the autumn.
We’ll also have the hide facility on the profiles working soon.
Good traffic levels have been maintained with the Connect page being particularly popular. To push usage up we need to make sure we have a good flow of fresh content – so please let us have any ideas for new sections or information you think would be useful on the site.
