The bp society website: A digital hub uniting the community of retirees

Website Design  +  Print

The bp society

The bp society is a membership based community of former bp employees. It’s primary role is to:

  • Keep retired members connected with each other and the company
  • Organise events in 12 regions throughout the UK
  • Share news and interesting stories relating to society members
  • Provide information and offers exclusive to former BP employees.

For the society to meet these obectives, a comprehensively considered and well executed technical website development was required.

Translating complex web functionality into a streamlined, easy-to-manage administrative interface, and a clean, user-focused design.

Planning the website

As with every website, planning is the most crucial step. At this stage Brandspace are seeking a lot of information as to what the business is about. Maximum effort is given in strategic thought to devise a website plan that defines the purpose of the website, timeline/budget, target audience, website content, structure and features. Read more here on the importance of planning

Membership Management

A website has two sides: the front end, that which the audience views and interacts with, and the back end, which is the behind-the-scenes part that developers use to manage data, user accounts, and code how the site works.

In addition to these two views, creating a members-only community website requires further levels of privacy, to ensure that the public and society members can only see content relevant to their access level.

As skilful developers we must also create a back end system that manages different user roles, assigned with varied permissions, so all those administrators (more often non-technical people) can create/add news articles, organise ticketed events, and manage subscriptions and payments – all without disrupting the overall function of the website.

The skill is to create a website that handles all these complexities reliably and securely for the society organisers and it’s 4000+ members.

Events, booking and ecommerce

The bp society organises regional events up and down the country for it’s 4000+ members. All event details are published on the website and tickets can be purchased via the event booking system. For the organisers, the booking system allows them to see who is attending, who’s paid, and even what menu choices a member has made for their meal.

We built the website with ecommerce functionality that handles both membership subscriptions and event payments. The event disbursement is a notable achievement with ticket sale money being distributed automatically to there relevant regional account. This sounds obvious and simple and functions as such, but the banking and security implications needed some organisation and clever website architecture.

Website design for the whole society

For the bp society website, we adhered to the design principle of “form follows function”. This simply means that a site’s visual layout and elements should be shaped primarily by its intended purpose and user needs, ensuring usability and clarity come before fancy and supeflous aesthetics.

The result is a comprehensive website masterfully distilled into a clean design. It has a functional elegance that aligns with the bp brand (as it must).

For its members the website offers an intuitive, focused and user-friendly experience. For society organisers the website offers a secure, stable and efficient platform on which to fulfil its mission – to serve members the news, offers and events that help keep an international community connected and informed in retirement.

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