Storm12 replaced an inefficient, inflexible CMS with our bespoke solution that provided the CTPA with a sophisticated range of new features, all within a highly secure environment. The site has received universal praise from CTPA members for its easy navigation and clarity, and provides a continuous source of industry current affairs.
The user experience of the site was of utmost importance. We needed to plan out multiple user journeys which took into account the hidden content that can only be seen as a logged-in member.
The creative applied to these journeys needed to be highly visual and was designed in collaboration with the development team to seamlessly integrate with the user experience for the CTPA team in the back end of the website.
CTPA is the official association representing all types of companies involved in making, supplying and selling cosmetic and personal care products in the UK. The website we built and support for CTPA is much more than a simple brochure.
It contains lots of different types of content, from simple blocks of text to interactive panels that invite user input. With a membership portal, news update subscriptions, online learning services, full e-commerce facilities for downloadable resources and webinars, and much more, it's a vital part of CTPA's operations.
Since every website we build is unique and bespoke to our clients' requirements, we were able to develop a content management system (CMS) for CTPA that speaks their language and has grown as their needs have evolved.
All parts of the website can be edited by CTPA's administrative team instantly without any technical skills and without needing continuous help from us. To ensure their online services are secure, CTPA regularly conducts audits and penetration tests on the website, which it passes every time!
A lot of the work CTPA does for its members is commercially confidential, and so the CTPA website provides an easy way for the CTPA administrators to publish content that's restricted to only authorised, logged-in visitors.
This means that most of the site's news articles, pages and resources are hidden from casual site visitors, and also that purchasable assets such as white papers, webinars and online training courses can be priced differently depending on each visitor's membership status as they go through the checkout process.
CTPA needed an online platform to allow them to deliver training courses to their members. They investigated many off-the-shelf options but couldn't find any that worked in the way they wanted, so they commissioned us to develop bespoke functionality that is integrated within their website.
We designed and built from scratch a platform that guides students through multi-stage training courses, with short informational videos followed by quizzes to test understanding. The site tracks each student's progress, so courses can be completed in multiple sessions. When a student completes a course they can download a certificate for their HR record.
To ensure that they are providing their members with good value, CTPA routinely monitors which content on their website is most helpful and popular with logged-in visitors.
To help them do this, we built a connection between the website and the API of their third-party membership database that records each page view against members' records automatically and silently in the background. The business insight that this provides is hugely valuable to CTPA's management team.
CTPA have been so pleased with the bespoke website that Storm12 designed and built for them in 2019 that we've since become their partner for all their online projects.
Their public-facing website The Facts About was the second website we redesigned and built from scratch, and in 2022/23 we've been working on a new website that gives STEM teachers and school students access to authoritative factual content related to the cosmetic and personal care industries.
Before we launched the main site and key functionality, we created animations that either explained how to use key elements of the website such as the members area or explained how beneficial new features were to current and prospective users.
Notable new features were the events section and online learning platform which were completely new to the CTPA website, so we created short snippets for use on social media and then slightly longer benefit-driven animations to be used as an introduction on the site itself.
Each year CTPA create an annual report as most businesses do. These reports were usually printed, with a digital copy hosted on their site. We suggested that they could achieve more engagement and glean more insight from an interactive pdf.
Our interactive annual report delivered a more engaging experience with linked contents page, embedded video, page turning and page load effects, along with delivering SEO value to the site and insightful information about individual page views, page dwell time and link clicks.
