About PARN Global
The Professional Associations Research Network is a non-profit membership organisation for professional bodies, offering expertise, experience and perspective on the central issues in the sector through research, consultancy, networking, events and training.
The PARN directors wanted a new modern responsive membership web design with a clear navigation structure. They have a great many pages, and their members were finding the old website cumbersome and unfriendly. They also required bespoke CMS development, as they needed complete administrative control to upload training courses, allow new members to subscribe, and run bespoke functions against their members database. PARN Global receives over 15,000 web visitors monthly.
PARN later asked us to create a SOC database, and commissioned a membership forum which went into development after launch.
Why membership sites are harder than they look
A membership website is two websites sharing a domain. There is the public site, which has to persuade non-members to join, and the members area, which has to serve people who have already paid and expect it to work. Those have opposite design goals, and most off-the-shelf membership plugins do one of them badly.
The navigation problem PARN described is the common failure. Membership organisations accumulate pages — research, events, courses, publications, policy, member benefits — and without a deliberate structure the site becomes something members endure rather than use. Fixing that is information architecture work before it is design work.
Then there is the content management question. Subscriptions, renewals, course bookings and member records all have to be manageable by the organisation itself, not by a developer. If updating a course date requires raising a ticket, the site will fall out of date within a year.
Bespoke rather than a plugin
Off-the-shelf membership plugins assume your organisation works the way the plugin author imagined. For a straightforward paid-content site that is fine. For a professional body with tiered membership, corporate members, event pricing that varies by tier and a research library with access rules, it is not.
We build bespoke web applications so the system follows the organisation. PARN needed a members database with bespoke functions against it, and that is what they got — not a plugin bent into an approximate shape.
If you run a professional body, trade association or membership organisation with a site your members complain about, that is the work. The Prolift Access case study is a comparable build.
Project development work carried out
Bespoke CMS Development
Complete administrative control — upload training courses, manage subscriptions and run bespoke functions against the members database in-house.
Navigation Restructure
A clear structure across a large page count, so members find what they need instead of giving up.
Responsive Design
Rebuilt to work properly on every device, for members reading research on a train as much as at a desk.
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