The Challenge

APTA.org grew organically until it became an unwieldy site with over 9,000 content pages on 14 different microsites.

Redundant, out-of-date, and trivial content cluttered their website, making the valuable content harder to find. There was a lot of excellent content, but it lacked the context and prioritization to guide visitors. APTA had an inconsistent strategy around microsites and subdomains and lacked a topical organization across their sites.

APTA also needed clearer messaging around membership benefits to remind members of their existing benefits and advertise them to non-members.

The Solution

They had already conducted excellent user research on their key audience segments, which we leveraged. We focused on consolidating microsites, content strategy, and CRO messaging to advertise membership benefits to prospective members and to remind existing members of their benefits.

• We conducted a content inventory and audit and created business rules to automate a first pass of content review.
• Using scripts, we identified existing taxonomies and then applied the new taxonomy to all pages to create a seamless user experience.
• We worked with their team to develop guidance for when to use microsites and when to consolidate. The redesign of APTA.org included folding in a major microsite: PTnow.org.
• We helped APTA prioritize content with a content inventory, using SEO and analytic data, and designed components to help APTA prioritize content on the site for visitors.
• We added Integration with iMIS AMS, ThinkingCap (LMS), ISG Web (eCommerce), EBSCO Publishing platform, Informz Email Marketing (part of Higher Logic), and several custom databases/applications.
• Enterprise Search was set up to crawl and index 3rd-party content, including the EBSCO publishing platform. Federated Search provides universal results.
• We added a Members-only model/Metered Paywall to emphasize membership benefits and improve acquisition (a la Wash Post/NY Times).