American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, CommonSpot, PaperThin, Usability, Design, Membership, CSS, redesign, branding, ColdFusion programming

American Society of Consultant Pharmacists

Solution: Design/Identity, Usability, Content Management
Vertical: Association, Non-Profit

The American Society of Consultant Pharmacists (ASCP) is an international professional association that provides resources, education, advocacy and leadership to advance the practice of consultant and senior care pharmacy. Its members manage and improve drug therapy and the quality of life for patients in sub acute care, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, hospice programs, home-care and community-based care. ASCP has a wide number of stakeholders including patients, consumers, healthcare professionals, doctors, nurses, product managers, pharmaceutical advertisers, industry lobbyists, academia, researchers, policy makers, press, consumers and media.

ASCP was seeking a website redesign to help accomplish their organization goals. The existing site was difficult to maintain and was the by-product of different employees over the years that have long since left the company. ASCP needed a way to manage their over 3000 HTML pages and approximately 300-400 PDF documents on their in-house Mac OS and Linux system. ASCP wanted to make their website more community-oriented, to retain current memberships and to increase new members. They also wanted to reduce the weekly call-volume of inquiries for request for information that was already on their website, but was difficult for their stakeholders to find.

Fig Leaf Software’s creative team of award-winning graphics artists, seasoned writers, experienced programmers and expert information architects worked collaboratively with ASCP throughout the project. Fig Leaf created a site-map to enhance the navigation and to address the issue of the weekly call volume. The solution involved Fig Leaf creating two types of navigation; one based on informational topics and another that is an action-oriented, menu-driven navigation. Fig Leaf helped to implement a WSYIWIG content management system, CommonSpot, to enable ASCP’s staff to easily manage and update their website content without having to code in HTML. Fig Leaf developed the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for ease-of-maintenance, the layout for improved navigation and the HTML design to reinforce ASCP’s brand.

Fig Leaf Software ensured ASCP’s goals were achieved by creating a user-friendly website with intuitive navigation and consistent branding. ASCP now has a standard tool that their non-technical staff can use for website content creation, management and publishing. Fig Leaf integrated ASCP’s new site with their back-end databases and implemented a process that optimizes ASCP’s vast content repository. ASCP is now empowered to easily manage, move and maintain content over the web much faster and more accurately than before. The website now has improved usability, greater operational efficiencies, an enhanced aesthetic design that boosts the association’s image and an overall improved user experience. As a result of the website redesign, ASCP membership has increased by nearly 8% to 7,000 members.