Consolidate websites and systems into a centralized, flexible CMS to reduce costs and create a cohesive user experience.
Organize site navigation around user needs, not internal departments, to improve accessibility and engagement.
Integrate journal or magazine content into your main website to drive traffic and cross-engagement.
Protect valuable resources with a thoughtful paywall strategy and maintain quality with a clear governance plan.
Avoid these common association website mistakes
Even the most well-intentioned association websites can fall into patterns that limit their effectiveness. From scattered systems to overlooked content opportunities, these common missteps can frustrate members, weaken your brand, and hurt long-term growth. The good news? Most are fixable with the right strategy and governance in place.
1. Too many websites and systems
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2. Website is organized around departments, not users
When you look at your site’s navigation, does it resemble your association’s org chart? This is an easy trap that many associations fall into. The problem is that users don’t think like internal departments. They may need information about a particular topic, but they don’t care if it was created by the education or the events team. Our number-one goal when developing a site’s architecture is to improve the user experience by aligning your users’ needs with your own.
3. Valuable content is locked in a journal platform or magazine
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4. Giving away too much for free
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5. Lacking a governance plan
As associations grow, they often begin letting people across the organization update the website without enough centralized governance. As a result, there’s often no editorial strategy, a cluttered user experience, and the organization’s mission gets lost. Creating a governance plan will give your website a clear content strategy, editorial structure, and workflow.
If you’re interested in hearing more about how your association can benefit from our 20 years of digital expertise, please reach out to us! We’d be happy to explore ways to improve your organization’s digital presence.
Insights
Insight
4 ways to revolutionize your association's marketing strategy
Most associations have more than one website and many different systems to support it. There’s the meeting site, a marketing campaign site, chapter sites, and sometimes dozens more. We typically hear it was easier to create a new site rather than add to the existing one. The result is a myriad of different websites and technologies that harm the user experience, reduce search engine rankings, and increase long-term maintenance costs. Any modern website should offer a centralized, flexible content management system (CMS) and a component-driven design that makes new site pages easier and less expensive to create–all while helping provide a more cohesive brand and user experience.
Many associations publish highly valued journals or magazines that reveal the latest research and trends in the profession or industry. Too often, that content is on a distinct publishing platform at a separate domain, so members have no reason to visit the main site and interact with your other valuable resources. Instead, associations should integrate their journals and magazines on the main website. If that’s not possible, we recommend pulling in such content via an API and showing it on relevant pages to add value. At a minimum, articles should also appear in the search results of your main website.
One of the biggest challenges when building a new website is deciding what’s free and what is behind the member paywall. It’s common for associations to give away valuable resources, so site visitors don’t have a reason to sign in or join. We challenge associations to think strategically about their value and how to leverage it toward membership. When gating, we recommend allowing non-members to see the first couple of paragraphs or a summary of the content so they know what they’re missing and are encouraged to convert to paying members.
