Chartered Institute of Housing member site gets a redesign

“Our new homepage is absolutely fantastic – it looks 100% better than we imagined. It is a true showcase of all the different elements of our organisation. The look is energetic and enticing – but most importantly is so much easier for our members to use, understand and navigate. It is already loved – and we have received great comments from our customers.”

Josie Twinning, Head of Marketing and Communications.

After a lot of hard work and effort on both sides, the first phase of work was unveiled which has seen a number of changes and improvements across the site, including a completely new homepage design, site-wide navigation, universal footer navigation and search function.

The new homepage is clean and easy to navigate with much more of the CIH’s personality and member values coming through. The new masthead includes a registration promo which updates depending on your user status, and there is now more dynamic content being surfaced to drive traffic around the site.

The site navigation methodology has been overhauled with the use of a drop-down menu for primary/secondary navigation to improve the way content is organised and found; a new universal footer navigation for key information and social media links; and a general improvement to the visual appearance of links across the site pages.

The search is powered by Autonomy’s IDOL enterprise technology and has been optimised in terms of the look and feel and the UX. A clean fresh design and use of the full width has allowed more content to be pushed up the page to the top, with all filtering (facets) and related content suggestions being served either side of the results. The end result being an intuitive and easy to use search function sitting at the heart of the site.

The response to the work so far by the CIH has been full of praise and we are looking forward to continuing the partnership in 2013. The next phase of work will focus on the member areas and personalisation (like ‘My CIH’), including a complete redesign of the user account pages, simplifying registration steps and managing content alerts; and an overhaul of the e-commerce/shopping basket experience. The result of this work will be a much-improved UI/UX for site users and increased visibility of benefits of membership.