Case study for website design & development

A Bright Case Study

www.webbrightservices.com

The Challenge
Columbus Metropolitan Club (CMC) is a wellestablished membership organization in Columbus,
Ohio that has been serving its 800 individual and
corporate members for the past 37 years through its
weekly forums, special events, and other programming.
CMC has been using Wild Apricot (WA) to manage
their website, membership, and events for the past 5
years. They’ve been pleased with WA functionality, but
want to enhance the design and navigation of the site.
The home page highlighted upcoming events- making it
easy for site visitors to find and signup for upcoming
events. CMC events are well-attended (200+
attendees) with some celebrity guests including local
and national business and political leaders.
However, CMC has an active Facebook page and

popular YouTube channel, in addition to other
resources, which the site didn’t promote very well.


Example issues
The site had a top-level page called
Facebook. The page had a “giant thumb”
image and instructions to “like” CMC and
visit the Facebook page.
This is neither intuitive or acceptable for
site visitors. It is also a waste of the
website real estate. (Do not try this on
your website!)


And again…
This page featured CMC’s YouTube
channel and The Ohio Channel under
“Streaming Video Archive”.
Would you know to look for this content
there?


What CMC wanted & what we promised
• Cleaner, more professional look

• Simpler, easier navigation
• Better recognition of major funders in flash animation
• More visibility to social networks and external resources (Facebook &
YouTube)

• But, maintain upcoming weekly events front-and-center on home page


The Solution
What we delivered


What we delivered
• Simple, clean, and elegant Wild Apricot theme
• Easy-to-navigate website re-structure

• Custom event and sitemap widgets
• Animated speaker banner (image slider)
• Enhanced marketing and publicity strategy


Old
Design.
Generic.
Poorlydesigned.
Lack
strategy.


New
Design.
Clean.
Simple.
Elegant.


Custom Features
The staff at CMC have been manually adding
and updating upcoming events on the home

page using HTML and Wild Apricot’s CMS.
While Wild Apricot has a built-in event widget, it
did not provide the design or event details CMC

is looking for. We customized a new event
widget that automatically pulls events from Wild
Apricot’s event module and displays event title,
time & date, speaker, and event sponsor.
The events are still front-and-center on the

home page giving them the visibility they need,
but with more style and less work.


Guest Rotating
Images
CMC hosts hundreds of guest speakers
throughout the year and wanted to feature
as many as of them as possible. How do
you do that without crowding the home

page?
We added an image slider (animated
banner) with images of speakers that
rotated on the home page. The images
show a representation of CMC’s speakers

and community, which CMC will be able to
update a few times throughout the year.


Sitemap Widget
Our designer did an amazing job creating a state-ofthe-art website design for CMC. While some elements

look fantastic in Photoshop, the development tool
sometimes doesn’t support the designer’s vision. In this
case, the designer added an attractive sitemap in the
site footer, however, Wild Apricot does not support this
style. Luckily, our developers are great at pushing
through Wild Apricot limitations. In this case, we
created a custom sitemap widget that looks like the
original design and has the capability of automatically

updating any structural changes in the website.


Marketing Focus
Talking with CMC, we determined three (3) objectives that are
important for the organization:
•

Driving membership

•

Promoting forums and special events

•

Gaining financial support

To allow CMC to achieve these goals through their website, we
added call-to-action (CTA) buttons with clear, actionable verbs.
•

Register for Events

•

Join CMC

•

We placed the buttons on the home page in prominent positions to
gain the most results.
Other important marketing features that we incorporated in the
website included an on-demand video archive, newsletter

Support CMC

subscription, Facebook, and YouTube.


Enhanced Publicity
CMC draws a lot of attention in the media;
writers and reports cover CMC activities and
news all the time. We made this coverage
more visible by posting article titles directly

on the website with active links to each
article. The custom widget, called “CMC in
The News, includes a link to CMC News
History which opens an external page with
more articles.


Media
We cleaned up the site navigation and
added a section for “Media” which hosted
important media channels including
Facebook, YouTube, news subscription and

a newsletter archive. This gives these
external resources more prominent
placement and attention.


What our client says
“Our experience working with Webbright was very positive. Other providers never
understood the Wild Apricot part.. thus they couldn’t price fairly. (We heard it will
cost you this.. And we will figure out WA after you pay us.) Webbright listened to
our ideas, concerns, and hopes, and reflected these in the work product.
We would highly recommend Webbright for their expertise with Wild Apricot,

confidence in their deliverables, and creative
solutions.”
– Andrew Campbell, Program Director


Need help with your Wild Apricot website?
Contact us today:
info@webbrightservices.com
Call or text: 804-638-4448


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Case study for website design & development