Join us as we share best practices and recipes for success from our reviews of 50 largest associations in America. Discover what other associations are doing—innovative sites and those innovation hasn't reached—along with breakthrough sites that are shining examples of better communications. We look forward to discussing all that we have learned during our site visitsSM review. You will learn: - compelling trends in site navigation and structure to guide your redesign - recognize innovation (or the lack of it) in homepage design - best practices in the presentation of thought leadership - why some membership centers sing and others sag - statistics about responsive design, taglines and other marketing features - how to balance visual and verbal communications for optimal reader attention

1. what’s trending in association
websites @ a glance

2. what we’ve done

3. five key pages reviewed per association

4. why ?

8. • thousands of pages, not a web page
• device friendly responsibility
• content arms race
• lead generation promise and pressures
• sophisticated CMS tools and integration
with your marketing ecosystem
today’s realities

10. caveat:
with all the fervor about digital
technology, marketers often forget
visitors don’t read code

11. some balance
best of breed,
design, content
and technology

16. methodology?

17. which sites we touched
•50 of the largest US
Associations
•AMLAW Global 100
•Accounting Today 50
•Vault 50 consulting
firms by prestige
•all organized by
headcount …

19. criteria for our comments

26. mom’s rule

27. you know how it goes:
if you don’t have something nice
to say …

29. about those ribbons

33. observation one:
clear and pervasive brand promises
are lacking on many sites

40. consistent and impressive branding

41. going deep with a brand promise
one example …

62. observation two:
responsive design is becoming the standard

71. observation three:
sites still dominated by words v. visual content

80. when designing content:
visit the entire salad bar

81. rethink content as a salad bar

93. observation four:
publications and news pages lack editorial simplicity
(and with so many sources of information, they need it)

100. v

108. observation five:
associations are people driven organization,
yet sites too often lack the human element

120. observation six:
adoption of visual content, video and moving
elements to engage visitors is trending

127. observation seven:
this old template is still too common, there is a visual
and verbal vocabulary that dominates, causing a sea of
sameness

132. notable exceptions

141. observation eight:
clever branded imagery is rare, associations hue toward
the literal … with some pleasant exceptions

147. wrapping up