BIA of Clark County

Website Design / Custom Web Development

Supporting the Local Building Trades

The core mission of the Building Industry Association of Clark County (BIA) is to promote & protect the building industry. They employ a multi-faceted approach to government affairs, public relations and professional development. The BIA is the Southwest Washington region’s leading building industry and small business advocate. The Association also serves as a much needed and singular resource for members and the general public on everything building industry-related.

The BIA approached Shop as they were beginning to look for new local design companies to work with on their website redesign project. Prior to being awarded the project, we spent time getting a deeper understanding of what the BIA was trying to accomplish in the next evolution of their site—leading to several good conversations between our teams.

Prior to being awarded the project, we spent time getting a deeper understanding of what the BIA was trying to accomplish in the next evolution of their site.

The BIA had some very specific requirements for the redesign—mostly around the need to eliminate some of the growing pains they had experienced with their previous content management system. While the CMS was built on the WordPress framework, the team had outgrown the custom interface, and as a result, had been steadily accumulating a series of work arounds to get the site to do what it needed to do (both visually and technically). These tasks were adding time and complexity as they were adding to the site.

Custom website development is something that we’ve spent a lot of time honing our skills in. Because of our in-depth experience were sure that we could design and deliver a custom experience tailored specifically to the BIA’s daily workflow.

Marrying Substance with Content

The BIA offers a diverse set of services to the local building industry, but also to a wide variety of other business types. Those diverse audiences meant that we needed to build an experience that could speak to these different groups in a way that was meaningful, regardless of who they are. The strategy was to provide layers of information and content that could be explored by any specific professional group, but for builders (the core BIA demographic) the site would provide a richer pool of content to explore specifically related to their trades.

We worked very closely with the BIA team crafting messaging, photo selections, and design elements to ensure that we were on point with the initial goals we identified, while maintaining the goals of the organization as a whole. The website we crafted for their team consisted of several dozen pages, a custom CMS built on the WordPress framework, auto updating data tables as part of their extensive membership network, and a refined user experience.

Working on the Go

Another important focus of the project was on the mobile version of the site. The previous incarnation of the BIA site was built responsively, but with the modifications and work arounds introduced by the team over the years, presentation on tablets and phones was beginning to show its age resulting in the site breaking down in certain areas.

We carefully constructed mobile presentations and a responsive site design that worked across a multitude of formats and gracefully degrading—providing basic content on older browsers and devices. We created specialized views to support their extensive member section, events, and programs.

The previous incarnation of the BIA site was built responsively, but with the modifications and work arounds introduced by the team over the years, presentation on tablets and phones was beginning to show its age resulting in the site breaking down in certain areas.

The resulting mobile design does not have to sacrifice or conceal any of the desktop site’s functionality, allowing existing members or newly interested users to complete a wide array of member-related searches and tasks.

Custom Icon Design

Most projects require a series of iconographic images to represent concepts that can be mapped to simple images. Many times we can find existing sets of icons that work well for most of a website’s language needs. Regardless of working with pre-constructed iconography, there are always fine tuning tweaks that need to be made to the icons in order to get that perfect match. With the BIA site, we developed a series of custom icons to fit into the gaps between what we had on hand with a pre-existing set and what we needed. The resulting icon set marries perfectly to the concepts the BIA needed to describe to prospective customers and members.

Custom WordPress UI Design

The previous manifestation of the site was built with a custom user interface. Over time, however, the types of tasks the BIA team were working on expanded, giving way to new content needs that the original UI could not accommodate without extensive workarounds. The team managed the workarounds for roughly two years before moving on to the redesign.

Prior to, and during the project, we spent a lot of time discussing the UI design and how that mapped to the BIA’s workflow and needs. We designed a series of custom screens inside WordPress to accommodate the existing and new processes. The new designs managed to shave significant time off many of the tasks done on a daily / weekly basis.

Project Outcomes

Developed a series of custom CMS interfaces designed to facilitate and foster the current workflow of the BIA staff, while eliminating the workaround time required by the previous version of the site.
Built a new responsive site that takes into account the users’ needs to access member data regardless of physical environment or device type.