Websites and portals for member bodies

Yes — permissioned content, member directories, document libraries, event registration and self-service account management. This is application work rather than publishing, so it usually sits on Laravel with a CMS alongside for the public site.

Yes, and it usually should. The association database generally stays the source of truth for membership status; the portal reads from it rather than becoming a second, competing record. We build the integration so neither system drifts.

Yes. COBA's website and member portal came to us from a previous agency, not meeting members' or administrators' needs; we reviewed, rebuilt and still support both. See project rescue for how a handover works.

In practice it collapses to five jobs: find a document or piece of guidance, check something about their own membership, find another member, register for something, and get an answer they would otherwise have to email someone for. If those five are fast the portal works. If they take three clicks and a search that does not, no amount of additional functionality rescues it.

Because the administrator is the second user and rarely gets designed for. If updating a document library means editing a page template, the content ages — and a portal with stale content trains members not to come back. The fix is structural: documents, events and member records modelled as types of thing with defined fields, so the person maintaining it fills in a form rather than laying out a page.

Yes, and it is worth taking seriously — a directory is often the most-used feature and the least-designed. For COBA, Find a Bank was a core deliverable rather than an afterthought, because locating a member institution is a job the sector genuinely needs done.

Entitlement follows the membership category rather than a manually maintained list of people, and it is enforced at the data layer rather than by hiding links in the interface. A menu item that is merely not shown is not access control — the underlying document is still reachable by anyone who knows or guesses the address.

That is usually the hardest part and the most valuable. Associations accumulate submissions, guidance and research over decades, filed under conventions that changed several times. Search has to work across the whole library rather than the recent uploads, which means the archive needs structure before it needs a search box.

Not by logins. The measure that matters is whether members complete the job they arrived for — documents found, registrations completed, directory lookups that end in a result. A portal can have healthy login numbers and still be failing, and that is the case most often mistaken for success.