With members ranging from the major insurers, asset managers, broker-dealers/distributors, and 150,000 financial professionals, the Insured Retirement Institute is the only association that represents the entire supply chain of insured retirement strategies. They are leaders in encouraging ethical behavior, promoting understanding of the insured retirement value proposition, developing industry standards, and advocating before policymakers on issues that impact their members. With so many visitors and functions, we knew the new Insured Retirement Institute website needed to be user-oriented. The old website’s navigation was built upon departments, rather than resources for members. Going into this project, we wanted members to reach what is important–advocacy, research, education, conference information, and operations & technology news–with as few clicks as possible.
One thing was abundantly clear to us, the Insured Retirement Institute would benefit from responsive design. With such a large member base, it’s guaranteed the website is being viewed on desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, and other handheld devices. Responsive design ensures that a page looks good on devises of all sizes. To check out what responsive design looks like, with this page open (or myirionline.org), pull the internet browser smaller and bigger and see the content adjust! Having a responsive design becomes more and more important as technology develops and new devises are released. The Insured Retirement Institute’s site is safeguarded against unforeseen changes in screen size.
The Insured Retirement Institute utilizes a handful of staff members to regularly update content on myirionline.org. Having a complex system for making those updates was not an option. We agreed a straight forward drag-and-drop CMS was important; Sitefinity was the obvious choice. However, we knew a powerful search engine would be helpful for members looking for specific content on the information-rich site, and Sitefinity’s search does not cut it. We decided to use Solr, a powerful search engine built on top of Lucene.
IRI uses Avectra for membership management. Not only did we re-skin their portal to make it look and feel like their new website, but we also integrated Avectra throughout their site to allow for single sign on. With single sign on, members can visit different parts of the site without having to log-on for every action.
