A modern membership website for LION publishers
LION Publishers is the leading professional journalism association for independent news publishers.
The Code Company was asked to create a membership website that puts LION’s mission front-and-centre and makes it easy for users to access online resources.
The Challenge
Create a low-code, high-performance publishing website
LION’s website was outdated and had been built to look like a publishing platform rather than a membership association. It was slow, difficult to navigate and lacked conversion opportunities.
To modernise the organisation’s digital experience, The Code Company created a low-code WordPress solution that was easy to operate, easy to navigate and fast to load.
Our new membership website means we can provide members extra resources and insights in a way that we couldn’t before.
The site is a lot cleaner, it loads faster and we’re seeing good engagement in Google Analytics. People are now clearly finding the resources that we’d hoped for.
Chloe Kizer, Data and Product Manager LION Publishers
Improving site navigation
LION wanted to create a user experience that drives engagement and revenue.
Our digital strategists re-organised LION’s content into a structure that looks clean and is far easier to navigate.
These changes resulted in an immediate engagement boost and an increase in donations.
Growing subscriptions
Once we understood LION’s membership needs, it was clear they would benefit from a more sophisticated solution.
Memberful is a no-code plugin that provides a single source of truth and simplifies LION’s worklow.
With their new member management solution, the LION team can now:
- Create new membership plans with ease
- Launch group and corporate subscriptions
- Provide courses directly from the site with Memberful’s Learndash integration
- Simplify accounting practices by renewing members on the same day each year
Empowering the editorial team
A customised WordPress page builder transformed LION’s editorial experience.
A coherent digital experience is reliant on design consistency.
The Code Company introduced a custom page builder, which features pre-built modules and fonts.
To create new content, the in-house team simply drag and drop reusable blocks into their desired location.
As each new feature was developed we used online tools to update and train LION’s in-house team.
The Code Company created a series of small video tutorials that were very beneficial.
It definitely helped me stay abreast of what was being worked on and brought the whole team up to speed on how to build new pages.
Chloe Kizer, Data and Product Manager LION Publishers
Website development that follows the clock
The Code Code Company has remote working down to a fine art, which is great for global teams.
A project lead in the US and a development team in Australia meant we coded while the LION team slept, and changes were reviewed the following day.
Our project manager was great, time zones were never an issue and the feedback loops were very clear and efficient.
And the best part was that it came in under budget!
Chloe Kizer, Data and Product Manager LION Publishers
