How we improved the user experience on the Somerset Chamber’s website

Somerset Chamber of Commerce case study

Somerset Chamber of Commerce wanted a user-friendly website so it could continue to support its valued members and local businesses.

1.Challenge

Vital to the local business community, it was important to Somerset Chamber of Commerce to have a website that was fit for purpose.

Connect. Influence. Grow. That’s the message at the heart of the Somerset Chamber of Commerce manifesto. Supporting over 500 businesses throughout Somerset, the Chamber continues to play a hugely influential role within a vibrant, growing business community.

It’s this kind of support that has helped shape our success as a business. Naturally, we were delighted when the Chamber chose us to design their new website.

The Chamber’s pain points
  • Key information was difficult to find quickly on the old website.
  • The old website didn’t offer a smooth user experience.
  • The old website wasn’t optimised for mobile devices.
  • The new website needed to integrate with their member portal, ChamberMaster.

2.Approach

We put the end user at the heart of the design for the new website.

A fantastic user experience (UX) was high on the Chamber’s list of goals for their new website. We needed to deliver a site that anticipated user interaction, making it as easy as possible for visitors to quickly find the information they wanted.

By conducting audience profiling and looking at how users were navigating the Chamber’s current website, we began to map the architecture that would improve their experience. Seeing where the old website was confusing people and impacting their user experience showed us the path to correcting this in the new design.

Website research
  • User interviews & surveys
  • Analysis of real user journeys through the website
  • Industry and competitor research
  • Website page structure and navigation analysis

3.Results

A user-friendly new website increases productivity through slick third party software integration.

Driven by research, we designed the Chamber’s new website with their key information pages front and centre, so their users can quickly find what they’re looking for.

Each information page – Membership, Events, Business Support, etc. – integrates with ChamberMaster, a membership management system that manages the Chamber’s membership directory, events listing, and payment gateway. Robust integration with this business critical system was essential, and a huge amount of testing was done prior to launch to ensure any downtime would be minimal.

Once the website was live, we trained up the Chamber team and ensured they were familiar with their new user-friendly, WordPress CMS. The website has become a powerful, time-saving resource for the Somerset Chamber of Commerce marketing team, allowing them to quickly add member stories, news articles, and details of new events.

How did this benefit the Chamber?
  • An easy to navigate website that offers a great user experience.
  • Time-saving third party software integration.
  • A website beautifully optimised for mobile devices.

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