Trade Association Website Design Agency: Best Practices

When designing association websites, we use the following best practices:

1. Lead with member value: Make it immediately clear why membership matters and what members gain that they can’t easily get elsewhere.

2. Design around member journeys: Organize the experience around what prospective, new and existing members want to accomplish, not how the association is structured.

3. Make membership compelling: Communicate benefits, costs, eligibility and opportunities in ways that turn interest into membership.

4. Serve every audience: Create intuitive pathways for members, prospective members, sponsors, exhibitors, partners, policymakers and the public.

5. Make expertise discoverable: Showcase research, insights, industry standards, advocacy and educational resources so the association becomes a trusted source of knowledge.

6. Turn events into engagement engines: Make it easy to discover, evaluate, register for and participate in conferences, webinars and networking opportunities.

7. Personalize the experience: Deliver relevant content, recommendations and opportunities based on members’ interests, roles, industries and stages of engagement.

8. Build community beyond the conference: Use digital experiences to foster peer connections, professional development, collaboration and a sustained sense of belonging.

9. Earn visibility and authority: Architect content and technical infrastructure so the association is discoverable in search engines and cited by AI answer engines.

10. Measure what matters: Connect website performance to membership growth, retention, event participation, resource engagement, advocacy and non-dues revenue.

Two examples of trade association websites follow:

Society for Dermatology Physician Associates (SDPA) 

To signal a big change, you have to change something big. In response to rising skin cancers due to climate change and aging population worldwide, The Society for Dermatology Physician Associates turned to Elliance to modernize its identity and website to attract more Gen-X, millennial and Gen-Z members worldwide. 

This is what we created for them:

Oncology Nursing Society: Positioning the Standards Bearer of Advanced Cancer Care for future growth.

Challenge:

Realizing that their association would lose 20% of its membership to retirement in the next ten years, ONS entrusted Elliance with the development and implementation of a digital strategy to help grow their organization.

While the assignment certainly required re-organizing and re-designing content, our larger role was in helping ONS distinguish itself, increase the perceived value of being a member and grow annual revenues from courses, publications and conferences.

Strategy:

To achieve this, Elliance shifted the focus of the Oncology Nursing Society’s institutional strength onto the strength of its members. We presented ONS as 39,000 cancer caregivers whose collective experience and expertise have the power to transform cancer care for the better, forever. Our digital strategy put “Nurses First” – elevating, celebrating and supporting them with three integrated websites.

ONS Website:

ONS Foundation:

ONS Voice: As the standards bearer of advanced cancer care, the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) wanted to create a communications platform that positions them as the go-to thought leader in all matters concerning oncology nursing. To realize this goal, Elliance and ONS reinvented their online publication as an always-on, always-fresh news, views and advocacy engine, called ONS Voice.

The ONS Voice was powered three key innovations:

1. A proprietary tagging system was developed that automatically groups the most popular articles and advocacy issues into trending topics.

2. Thought leadership keywords were “baked” into all articles to elevate their rankings on Google.

3. Smart forms of advertising opportunities were created to make the magazine self-sustaining and drive new revenue.

Results:

62% of ONS revenue began coming from ONS.org website. 16.7% General contributions growth in year-one of the ONSfoundation.org launch. 75% of voice.ONS.org traffic is organic and 99% of it comes via non-branded search terms.

If you are seeking a team of talented association website design agency to evolve your identity and redesign your website, please contact us.