GEA Garage Equipment Association

The problem

An association exists to serve members. The site had to make the directory and library genuinely usable.

What I did

• Website for the UK's Garage Equipment Association|Members directory, technical library and job opportunities board|Clean green-and-white brand identity with full-width workshop photography|Fully responsive with a matching mobile navigation

The brief

The Garage Equipment Association is a trade body. It represents equipment suppliers, sets standards for the sector, and accredits the engineers who service that equipment. A trade association’s website has a job most commercial sites do not: it has to serve members, prospective members and the public, and those three groups want almost nothing in common.

Three audiences, one site

A member arrives to use something: a document, a directory entry, a training booking. They know what they want and they want it in two clicks.

A prospective member arrives to evaluate. What does membership cost, what does it get me, who else is a member.

A member of the public, usually a garage owner or a vehicle operator, arrives to check whether a supplier or engineer is accredited. They have one question and they want a yes or no.

The temptation with three audiences is to build three sections and let each fend for itself. That produces a site where the homepage is a set of doors and nobody is quite sure which is theirs. The better answer is to make the most common task from each group reachable from the homepage directly, and to accept that the homepage will therefore look busier than a marketing site.

The accreditation directory

This is the part of the site that carries the most weight, because it is the association’s core function made public. It is built as a searchable directory with structured data behind it rather than as a page of names, which means it can be filtered by region and by accreditation type, and each entry has its own URL.

That last detail matters more than it appears. A supplier who can link to their own accreditation page has a reason to link back to the association, and those links are what make the directory findable in the first place.

Standards documents

Trade associations publish a lot of PDFs, and PDFs are where site content goes to become invisible. Every document has a real page with a summary, the publication date and the revision history, and the PDF is a download from that page rather than a link with no context.

A reader can then find the document through search, understand whether it is the current version, and download it. A bare PDF link achieves none of those.

The build

WordPress with custom types for members, accredited engineers, standards documents and training courses. Membership status is a field rather than a category, so a lapsed member disappears from the directory without their page being deleted and every link to it breaking.

What the association can manage

The directory, documents, courses and news. Adding an accredited engineer is filling in a form; they appear in the directory and in the regional filter immediately.

The stack

• WordPress Development

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