Helicopter Association International (HAI) is the leading membership and resource website for the helicopter community, with a network of over 25,000 members worldwide. With various resources scattered throughout the web—including the main website, five sister sites, and a new learning management software (LMS) and association management solution (AMS) — the Association wanted to improve their user experience and make content easier to find and promote. To meet this challenge, HAI partnered with 10 Pound Gorilla to enhance and synchronize their overall website experience.

10 Pound Gorilla created a unified experience with a complete website overhaul, brand enhancement, integration of single sign-on (SSO) for all 3rd-party services, and syncing of member and organization data via an application programming interface (API).

Before

After

Maintaining the distinct characters of HAI’s multiple sister-sites was critical. Therefore, 10 Pound Gorilla optimized HAI’s menu to incorporate their five sister-sites and designed a user experience to seamlessly preserves multiple brand identities. We used color coding to allow users to easily identify various sections of the website and designed cohesive program logos to strengthen the overall HAI brand while maintaining the identity of each program.

HAI’s website hosted a significant amount of resources that were difficult to administer, identify, and discover. To make resources manageable, 10 Pound Gorilla built a dynamic resource center that gives administrators an easy way to list resources in multiple site sections and allows users to find resources easily.

10 Pound Gorilla also built several custom applications, including a photo contest module. The photo module allows for automatic upload of entries to HAI’s YouTube channel and storage of videos in the cloud. We also designed and implemented a social voting system for community nominations to encourage traffic, engagement, and promotion. Lastly, we built an internal scoring application for easy organization.

In order to maintain the quality of the new user experience, 10 Pound Gorilla customized the content management system to allow site administrators to edit content easily at both a macro and micro level without ever having to compromise aesthetics or functionality.