The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE)

Built for Tomorrow: Launching a new membership website

Read the case study on the Cantarus website

The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) is the professional body for building services engineers, investing in education and research and supporting its community of built environment professionals in their pursuit of excellence.

CIBSE’s vision is for better-performing buildings for society and the environment, which needed to be reflected through an enhanced, revamped website.

The Brief

CIBSE’s main concern with their existing site was that it wasn’t offering the best user experience, and unclear informational architecture and less than intuitive navigation made it unnecessarily challenging to use.

Our development team was excited to work with CIBSE to design a more user-friendly site that would be engaging, smooth, and informative.

We re-platformed and redeveloped the site onto the Umbraco 8 platform. With our extensive experience as Umbraco Gold Partners, it was the clear solution!

Our Approach

In close collaboration with the CIBSE team, we created a new site that is much simpler for their users to navigate, with a modern, user-first design and straightforward search functionality. As their old website was outdated, we aimed to give them a fresh look and feel that would reflect their industry expertise and history.

After several weeks of online discovery workshops, we came up with a list of functional requirements for the new site:

1. Redesign the website to make navigation easier
2. Improve the content management experience
3. Significantly improve site search

Due to previous poor site navigation, it took a lot of work for users to find the information they needed. To combat this, we completely restructured the informational architecture, providing a new, improved design that guides users to relevant, helpful information efficiently.

Further, we implemented a megamenu-style navigation for more intuitive browsing.

One of the biggest pain points for CIBSE was the restrictive content management experience, which often meant that content managers were adding extra content to pages just to fill up white space.

Our design team created high-fidelity designs to maximise available screen space. We also created a suite of easy-to-use content blocks and flexible page layouts, allowing pages to feel similar through style while offering flexibility for different site areas.

It’s now easier than ever for CIBSE to deliver content. Content also wasn’t adequately surfaced through the old site, so we implemented a significantly improved site search to ensure the right content will reach the right people.

One of CIBSE’s main goals was to increase membership and renewals. Previously, it was unclear to members and non-members alike which types of membership are offered by the organisation, and which membership is the right fit for an individual. With no concise way of finding the membership journey, it was off-putting for users to join.

Working closely with CIBSE, we created a flow diagram ‘decision tree’, leading users to the membership journey that’s right for them. This sits as an interactive module within the website, enabling users to find the correct membership and link to the appropriate signup journey with ease.

We also introduced a new ‘Related Content’ feature across the site, as well as the ability to personalise certain web components based on a user’s profile.

This has helped better cross-reference information across the site.

Tools & Integrations

There are several areas of integration with external systems across the site:

Salesforce/Fonteva integration allows CIBSE to deliver content and events on the website connected to their CRM
Integration with mycareerpath for CPD (Continuing Professional Development) delivery
Jobs feed integration

CIBSE also has three tools hosted on the site, and as part of the new site, we ported each across:

Energy Benchmarking: This was the most complex tool, allowing users to see a graphical representation of energy data. We recreated this tool, ensuring existing functionality was recreated while considerably improving the overall look and feel.
Symbols: We integrated the ability to download all CIBSE Standard Symbols or as packages.
Weather Data: CIBSE supplies standard weather data files to be used in building performance analysis using simulation tools, so we integrated this too.

The Results

14% increase in the number of visitors in the first week,
Training Homepage visits up 22%,
Help for Applicants page visits up 30%,
15% more visits to the Knowledge Search page,
The new Membership Finder has had over 5,000+ unique pageviews over the first 4 months.

“Thank you so much to the Cantarus team for all their hard work and support in getting the new CIBSE website live – we’ve felt very looked after! We’ve been absolutely loving the new site; the go-live process was seamless and very smooth. Since we launched, we’ve had so much positive feedback from our users.”

Richard Howard, Web Manager