ABOUT

The Society for All Artists (SAA) – the world’s biggest art community – approached us to redesign and expand the ‘Community’ area of its website for its 50,000+ members.

The community area previously resided on the SAA's main e-commerce Magento website as a bolt-on feature and thus, wasn't really being used as intended. This wasn't at all surprising as the overall visual design, UX and information architecture was uninspiring and had become a little muddled over the years.

We were tasked with designing and building a separate, enhanced community area using WordPress, which would reside on its own domain and be more easily manageable and scalable going forward; and most importantly, would be far more user-friendly and engaging.

Following an extensive user research and discovery phase, we introduced all sorts of new content and features, including a custom Video-on-Demand portal, powerful search functionality, a highly visual UI to improve accessibility, live workshops, interactive competitions, and public-facing as well as members-only content.

We followed a strict SEO process to migrate all of the existing content into the new site and have seen a sharp increase in organic traffic as a result. This has resulted in an increase in SAA membership via direct referrals from the community area as well as an increase in competition entries and Paint magazine subscriptions. We've also received excellent feedback from long-time SAA members who have become far more engaged with their membership due to the new and improved community pages.