Tenterden Chamber

Focus On What's Truly Important

The client met with us following a review of their existing website. They felt their site had lost its core values and had morphed into a local tourism website, steering attention away from the active chamber members and leaning more towards promoting any business regardless of their membership or activities.

Shifting Back To The Core Values

The website needed to refocus its capabilities towards the chamber members, becoming a business directory which listed businesses and their events, jobs, and offers. More control would be given back to the members, allowing them to edit their own profile.

The scope of this project was vast, three aspects to the directory website would need to be created; the public directory, the member portal and the administrator portal. This was a large project that required time to complete.

Why Had Focus Changed?

During our research we discovered the brand identity of the chamber of commerce had become confused with other organisations in the local area, namely the town council. The brand had utilised the same town crest as the local council, resulting in an unwanted connection being made. Furthermore, numerous other organisations were using the town crest to represent their business, it was unclear which logo represented which business.

We believed in order to clearly convey the purpose of the chamber, a logo redesign was needed. Having an identity that used the Tenterden town crest was not only confusing but also felt exclusive to the chamber members who operated directly in Tenterden, the identity had to be more inclusive to members in the surrounding areas.

Giving Control Back To The Members

We developed a website that was simple to navigate, populate and build upon. Each registered member would log in to a secure portal to populate their business profile page with their information. This content would be reviewed and approved by the designated chamber administrator. This would ensure the content being posted was correct and appropriate.

A colour coding system was created for the new identity to easily distinguish between the various services provided by the chamber. The prototypes went through the various fidelity stages being reviewed and approved by the client as they progressed.

More Than A Website; A Member’s Platform

The build for such a large and complex platform is no mean feat. The system needed to be broken down into its relevant components and built from the ground up. Each component was thoroughly tested internally as the platform was brought together and the system was then tested as whole as each part was added.

Once the platform was operational, the committee and a few select members were invited to test the site in BETA. This allowed us to gather useful feedback and make a few minor usability and functionality adjustments.

With an array of different businesses, events, jobs and offers featured on the site, we needed to ensure we considered indexability and shareability. All relevant data types such as ‘local business’ were configured to be generated for the benefit of Google as well as social media sharing cards so that businesses and events could be shared effectively online.

A New Platform And A New Direction

The website was unveiled during a networking evening where we showcased its capabilities and walked through the simple registration process. We held a Q&A session to alleviate any concerns members had. The site was publicly launched days later and began establishing its refocused purpose and features with its audience.

Further discussions have been held with the client to propose the design and development of new features, namely email newsletter sign-ups, individual member analytics and an image gallery section to name a few.