Website Redesign: Indiana State Rifle and Pistol Association

The Indiana State Rifle and Pistol Association’s (ISRPA) website was showing its age. As a membership organization, ISRPA was using Wild Apricot to manage their member rolls and needed to keep that function unchanged. Unfortunately, Wild Apricot’s “website functionality” is pretty limited and can’t be extended via plugins in the way WordPress can. Fortunately, Wild Apricot has “single-sign-on” (SSO) functionality and an associated WordPress plugin allowing some integration between Wild Apricot and WordPress. This allows leveraging WordPress for website functionality and Wild Apricot for membership management.

ISRPA already had a WordPress-based website, but it lacked clearly organized content, consistently styled pages, event management functionality, and integration with Wild Apricot. Cardinal Acres Web Development’s goals in redesigning the site were:

• implement a consistent styling/design for all site content
• better organize site content
• integrate with Wild Apricot
• implement event management functionality
• implement email newsletter/marketing functionality
• future goal: bring member management into WordPress allowing ISRPA to leave the expensive Wild Apricot service

The Events Calendar, my go-to event management plugin, was installed to implement robust event management features. By leveraging event categories intelligently, events can be filtered and listed on the appropriate pages of the new website. This keeps similar information together for easier access by site visitors. WooCommerce integration means that event ticket sales can be easily added down the road.

In a similar fashion, WordPress’ built-in ability to post “news” and categorize it is leveraged in a couple of ways:

• inserting lists of relevant posts into various website pages; again, keeping similar information together for easier access
• near future goal: creating targeted email newsletters for the ISRPA membership and general public; this allows people to subscribe to email notifications of ISRPA advocacy updates by not for shooting sports updates

In a nutshell, the extensible nature of WordPress allows for much greater and richer functionality than the “closed” Wild Apricot ecosystem.

Finally, the web hosting that ISRPA was previously using was ridiculously short on storage space (not even 1GB) and also ludicrously expensive ($40 per MONTH without email or any other additional hosting functionality). Cardinal Acres Web Development got ISRPA setup on a KnownHost shared hosting account which gave them far more storage (KnownHost only limits storage via “inodes” not actual disk usage) and far better performance for 25% of what they were paying previously.