SGIA, the leading trade association for the graphics and printing industries, had outgrown their website. The old site, a patchwork of static HTML and homegrown ColdFusion applications, made content updates difficult, and even staff had trouble finding resources everyone knew were there.
Worse, members couldn’t find resources they were looking for, and prospective members weren’t aware of the depth of technical resources that SGIA had assembled over decades.
SGIA set out to put a content management system in place to address these shortcomings – and improve member outreach. Search was critical, as was building staff capacity for content updates and new features.
SGIA brought us in to to build a new website using Drupal, the open-source CMS.
We worked together with SGIA to achieve several goals for the project:
- Address SGIA’s separate Garment Decorators and Graphics audiences with distinct-but-related website designs and targeted content
- Implement a standard look and feel across a decade worth of how-tos and technical resources
- Expose all SGIA content – web pages, spreadsheets, Word and PDF documents – to full-text search
- Suggest related content dynamically, based on tags and full-text content analysis
- Allow convenient access from both mobile and desktop browsers
- Build staff capacity with Drupal so that future site enhancements can benefit from SGIA’s in-house graphics and programming expertise
Member feedback on the new design has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly among SGIA’s Garment Decorators, who have their own home online for the first time. And usage of the site has increased –
- The number of people using the site is up 19.5%
- The number of page views is up 26.9%
- The average session duration is up 5%
- The bounce rate is down by 18.6%
- The number of new visitors to the site is up 41%
- The number of mobile users is up 8%
- The number of tablet users is up 24%
– Introducing Two Content-Driven Websites for the SGIA Community
