Indie York: New Umbraco Website

Supporting Our City of Independents

York Independent Business Association (YIBA) inception came about after businesses in York were severely impacted by floods that came on Boxing Day during 2015. With concern for the future of traders in the City, Indie York secured funding for the creation of a website.

The website was initially launched in November 2016 as a prototype to promote collective brands, showcasing York’s wonderful alternatives to the usual high street names. During this time Indie York has successfully bought businesses together through the website, social media and paper map. These channels have continued to provide a useful and engaging guide for residents and tourists alike.

Since its initial launch the website received growing desire from YIBA and its members to extend and improve the functionality. In particular for YIBA to remove inefficient manual processes by adopting technology to streamline processes and improve support for its members. Utilising Google Analytics data, direct feedback from YIBA and its members this collective insight confirmed the core focus areas for the redevelopment project.

Development Opportunities

The prototype website presented opportunities that were all solvable and to some extent the natural progression to support the needs of any growing website:

• The hand illustrated map was not to scale therefore no user location or online mapping tools could be utilised to help visitors find member locations easily.
• Visitors had no easy way to search by business category or the ability to view the map and directory listing together.
• Social sharing was limited with little opportunity for engagement and sharing of content.

Website Redevelopment Goals

During the spring of 2019 YIBA continued its partnership with I‑Finity to redevelop and redesign the website to:

• Improve the experience for website visitors with more user-friendly features
• Provide operational efficiencies across member sign up, payments and renewals – ultimately removing all manual processes
• Enable operational savings by automating and streamlining interactions
• Enable members to securely access and update their own business profiles

Achieving Efficiencies with Technology 

Member Sign Up and Approval

This delivered significant benefits for new members to register online whilst enabling YIBA to adopt a streamlined way to manage the approval process within Umbraco Content Management System (CMS). Once YIBA approves new member requests, each approved member is granted access to their dedicated Member Profile area.

Securing and protecting data online

Security forms an essential part of I-Finity’s technical architecture to ensure all data is protected to meet both compliance and industry best practise standards. These standards are needed to effectively defend and protect against any potential online threats. The new member form requires a username and password to be created. This process for signing up, requesting forgotten passwords and resets are all managed within Umbraco CMS securely. Best practises have been implemented for security such as data encryption at the database level, all passwords are salted and hashed, this means no password data is readable.

Member Profile Management

I‑Finity developed a dedicated member profile area for each approved member to create and update details about their business. Quality assurance is supported with built in form validation and an approval process within Umbraco CMS for YIBA to approve all profile changes before anything becomes visible on the website. The quality of the imagery being uploaded is protected by auto-cropping and re-sizing to ensure all imagery is optimal for the design of the profile pages.

Secure Online Payment and Automated Renewal Process

Utilising technology to securely process payments and automate membership renewals was a much-needed capability to support YIBA’s growth plans. Therefore, quality time was spent upfront planning how online payments and the renewal process needed to work to support YIBA’s membership model. The planning time spent upfront enabled the capturing of user requirements to support the Agile development process. The solution was an integration into GoCardless supported with the development of a customised renewal process.

Partnering with Local Illustrator to keep Indie York brand consistent

Complete Redesign

Central to the website design included how the hand illustrated map, artwork and logo assets could be used to reinforce the updated design for brand consistency. Whilst at the same time enabling the much-needed improved user-friendly features.

I‑Finity worked closely with a local Illustrator (Emily Hayes) to capture all the assets, artwork, typography and colours into web ready formats. There was a balancing act of delivering on brand and optimising for search engines – for example, handwritten signs are not readable for search engines therefore a missed opportunity to have content indexed. Working in partnership with YIBA a balance was achieved to support search optimisation whilst keeping on brand with the printed map.

Google Maps API enabled I‑Finity to fully customise the theme to match the colour palette of the printed map. Within the website itself the typography and artwork has been incorporated in an accessible and web friendly way.