Website Redesign: NARI Central Indiana

Cardinal Acres Web Development recently took over administration of the NARI Central Indiana website. After a short time it became abundantly clear that the existing website wasn’t very well designed. The overall organization of the website was just this side of inscrutable (several navigation menu items pertaining to “membership” weren’t helping) and the user account section leveraged the WordPress dashboard, usually not a great idea for non-tech-savvy end users (the WordPress dashboard works fine for site administrators, but isn’t so great for much of anything else).

The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was when installation of the Wordfence security plugin introduced a link to its settings in the user account section. That isn’t the functionality one wants/needs as a site administrator. Luckily, Wordfence performed user privilege checks and prevented unauthorized access to Wordfence plugin settings. Even so, having a link to plugin settings on end-user-facing portions of the site was potentially confusing, at best, and a site security risk, at worst.

The new and redesigned website features:

  • design that better integrates with the NARI logo color scheme
  • site organization that condensed the previous multiple “membership” sections down to one page
  • search functionality added to the business listing section
  • all end-user facing elements moved to the front-end
  • custom user roles to easily differentiate members from non-members on the back-end
  • WooCommerce integration to make any future transition to e-commerce painless

Check out the below comparison to get an idea of the improvements made to just the user account section of the website:

New vs. Old NARI Central Indiana User Dashboard

Slide right or left to reveal more or less of the old or new user dashboard...

This and all of the other improvements listed above combine to make a drastically better website for both end-users and site administrators.

Does your current website need a redesign to improve functionality? Contact Cardinal Acres Web Development and have us take your site from inscrutable to self-explanatory!