A chamber of commerce is a complex organization. It takes a lot of work and effort to manage and understand your member’s businesses. In the same way that every business is unique, so are an organization’s members.

The challenges faced by the Cerritos Chamber in doing a redesign were multifaceted. The chamber had lots of information that needed to be available on the site. Some of that information was ever changing, some was not. All the information needed to be kept up to date and organized in such a way that someone looking for just one piece of information could easily find it.

In addition, the site had to service a broad audience. Some users were not members and would want information about the region and local community before making their decision to join. Others, were members and would want up to date information about upcoming events, legislation, and changes.

Breaking it down

By organizing all that the chamber does and the information it provides into three top-level areas we were able to make a large amount of information easier to digest and manage going forward. Using this organizational structure simplified the user experience for new users as well as seasoned ones.

Updates made easy

With the amount of information managed and maintained on a regular basis, updating the site needed to be extremely simple, intuitive, and easy for the chamber staff. We chose to use the open-source content management system Joomla. Combined with several add-on components for the member directory, the chamber store, and the calendar of events, the CMS architecture is extremely extensible for future growth.

Responsibilities

Information architecture, brand design, graphic design, user interface design, XHTML/CSS template development, PHP development.