Citroën Car Club of NZ Website Refresh
WordPress
Project Description
A full refresh of the Citroën Car Club of NZ website which ran from March 2021 through to February 2022.
My Role
Working with 2 other website administrators, my role was to provide advice and help with rebuilding the website from the ground up in a voluntary capacity.
My partner is a Citroën enthusiast and an active member of the club, so I worked closely with him to help him realise the joy that he gets from belonging to the community.
Challenges and Learning
- There was a mountain of content available, the challenge therefore was to find a good design that emphasised the content.
- People want easy-to-use interfaces like WordPress dashboards to help manage their content.
- Building elaborate self-service features is not always the best solution especially if people don't use the features.
- A well-functioning website is one that provides users with easy access to the resources that they need.
- Less customisation of code is better in the long run.
- WordPress has a lot of plugins on offer which can be overwhelming and time-consuming to learn and search for plugins that suit your needs.
Solution
Colour scheme
Blue, white, and red were chosen as the main influencing colours to tie into the French theme of the club. The secondary accent colour was primarily used for call-to-action interfaces.
A colour-themed approach to the branch clubs was used to help people distinguish between the different clubs throughout NZ. Black was used to highlight any special news or event announcements for the overarching umbrella organisation, the Citroën Car Club of NZ.
Design Choices
Different background effects, scrolling behaviour, hover effects, and iconography was used to create interest. Shape dividers were used to emphasise context changes in content.
The club has lots of photos from over the years which were incorporated into the design wherever possible. This achieves two goals, attracts new members to the club as they can see how active it is and helps existing members to make new connections and build relationships with other members in the club.
Accessibility Choices
Login and Join workflows are situated in the navigation bar as these were seen as two critical processes.
Club events, magazines, newsletters, and classifieds are the main drawcards for people to want to use the website. These were all made prominent features and accessible from any point in the website structure.
A 'My Dashboard' interface was designed to encapsulate all the features available to different levels of membership and a hierarchy of role-based authorisation levels was utilised to restrict access levels to different features of the website. This includes members, branch officers, website admins, and executive leaders each with unique needs. WordPress plugins were utilised to enforce this hierarchy of access privilages. This enabled granular restrictions to be placed on different areas of website content and features. It was suggested to have a base role called 'Citroen Fan' which could be used to denote a non-member. The benefit of doing this will enable non-members to view and explore all the features that a regular member has but access to those features would be locked. Effectively dangling a carrot on the stick, so to speak. This would also allow members to be downgraded should they choose to cancel their membership. This idea was not progressed further.
Future Ideas
Content Ideas
- A short video clip of club members driving in iconic places throughout NZ to showcase the beautiful New Zealand landscape and connect that to the Citroën brand in a uniquely kiwi way. Lots of aerial footage using drone footage would be ideal.
- Competition for members to submit a photo of themselves and/or their vehicle in an iconic place in New Zealand. Maybe have categories like best urban, best rural, best coastal, best metropolis etc.
- Data mining project to gather and display Citroën car data available through the open data portal run by Waka Kotahi. Suggest an interactive Power BI app for members to explore and use.
Design ideas
- Updating and redesigning all the Citroën car SVG and icons used in the website.
- Create a design toolkit to define the design choices of the club across print media and digital.
General ideas
- Observe the advertiser and partner strategies that the club has and try to integrate those into the web and social media presence that the club has. The benefit includes revenue for the club and perks for members.
- Help to set up and build a social media policy for the club and start building the presence of the club in the various channels that they use or may not use.
- Set up Google Analytics or some other analytics tracking to monitor and report back website statistics to the Executive.
- Look at better low-cost solutions like a headless CMS hosted on a cloud service like Amazon. The CMS will satisfy the current admin team whilst improving performance in terms of speed and storage. It will most likely be a lot cheaper than the current hosting services they are paying for and the multitude of plugin costs.
- A relational database for members to record and update their car details (suggested by an admin member).
- Design and deploy a car club app on iOS and Android and utilise the notification feature to alert members to new magazines becoming available, new events being posted, new media and news items of interest etc.