Better serve your members with creative association web design that puts their needs first.
Your website is a gathering place for professionals to share and promote themselves. At Orbit, we bring all of your members together through creative association web design that centers their needs.
Meeting those needs requires identifying the different access points and goals they have when using your association’s website. That can include; events and conferences, member promotions, industry promotion, sharing information and publishing work.
Creating a website that serves all these functions can be a challenge but with member-centered association web design, it’s possible.
There’s no one-size fits all formula for designing a website for an association. Different associations have different needs, and more importantly, they have different stories to tell.
Effective association web design uses design and content to get your unique story in front of the professionals you want to connect with.
Professional association websites connect your members with each other and the world.
For good reason, association websites often include a member directory that helps connect website visitors to people within the association. We lean on our association web design experience to create customized directories that meet this need.
Member databases are the central place where an association can manage all member information. In an ideal world, some of this system data is available publicly on the association’s site—and it gets there automatically.
The one-way stream of communication saves the time and energy of manually moving information from the association’s database to the website database.
Or take it a step further: If a member’s contact information changes, allow her to log in and make updates herself (rather than contacting the association). When members manage their own profiles, it creates two-way communication between the databases, saving the association time.
The Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification (CRCC) sets the standards for rehabilitation counselors. In addition to keeping standards high, they maintain a database of thousands of certified counselors.
This group needed a website that would connect visitors to counselors with various specialties and language skills. For example: Need a mental health expert who speaks Bengali?
We created the tools to open that two-way communication because it’s great when databases get along. The website grabs updated member information from the database; the database grabs member information that was updated on the website.
If your association website needs to be a database itself, it takes is little more planning and a little more programming. But thoughtful strategy and a strong development team enhance the possibilities.
A few of the features (beyond member directories) that we’ve built into association websites are event calendars, event registration, membership dues, member profiles, articles and job postings.
Since 2001, the Orbit web design and development team has been creating custom sites and managing tricky integrations. We’re content management experts and work closely with web strategists and project managers to create your perfect site.
