The old Adhesives.org website was a valuable source of information for the adhesives and sealants community. While the information was robust, it was organized in a manner that worked well for regular users of the site, but not as much for newcomers – or people arriving via search engines.
Our strategy incorporated a plan to ensure this site would remain a valuable resource, but would still be considered a powerful resource to the various audience types who visited. To do this we took a two-pronged site map approach. The first was to catalog the information per user type and the second was to create landing pages for the main visitors. Do It Yourselfers look for information in a much different manner than engineers – as such the presentation efforts need to be equally as dramatic.
Our approach was to have several calls to action on the home page which would direct to landing pages for each of the audience types. In addition, we would simplify the main menu navigation to have some of the encyclopedic efforts of the original site, but also some fast access pages.
The new website needed to be easy to navigate while presenting a modern look. Several components involved the heavy use of social media and user generated content. Adhesives.org was built with “ASCTv” – a video resource center. We actually looked towards The Ellen Degeneres Show’s video library for inspiration and married up the design to the blue-heavy Adhesives.org color palette.
Coming from DotNetNuke, the Adhesives.org team needed a content management system that was intuitive to use for all user types. Sitefinity CMS was the obvious choice here for the website redesign. Being a .NET CMS it was easy to integrate with several other legacy systems within the Adhesives and Sealants Council. One of the key systems we had to integrate with was the iMIS association management system. We synchronized member signups and newsletter signups with their iMIS database. We also performed a heavy integration with their member directory in the form of their vendor select tool. Here we use data from iMIS to determine the kinds of products their vendors sell, and then show an appropriate listing.
Our development team really enjoyed working on this project as it presented many non-standard challenges. In addition to linking up with YouTube to build ASCTv we worked on a tight integration with LinkedIn groups. To help with the social community development aspects, the ASCouncil thought it would be great to embed their linked in user base within their website. Now people who post discussions in LinkedIn get exposed on the Adhesives.org website – and those who work on the Adhesives.org website also communicate with the LinkedIn community at large, all in a seamless manner.
We are looking forward to additional integrations as we work on the Adhesive and Sealants Council’s main membership website.
