Established in 1950, Your Credit Union is a financial co-operative that serves more than 16,000 members across six member groups in the Ottawa region, including the City of Ottawa’s employees. It holds more than $190 million in members’ deposits.
Recommended to us by one of our agency partners, RealDecoy started working with Your Credit Union on a website redevelopment project in early 2008.
The team at Real Decoy made our experience of redesigning our website a pleasure. They were professional, knowledgeable, detail oriented, kept us updated through the entire process, offered suggestions and always made themselves available to answer questions. Special thanks to [project manager] Max Brennan who did an amazing job at managing this project from start to finish.
Kimberley Allo
Administrative/Marketing Assistant
Your Credit Union Limited
The Challenge
Creating a brand-new look for Your Credit Union
Coinciding with a corporate branding overhaul, Your Credit Union wanted to redevelop its existing static website with a completely new look and feel, including improved navigation and organization of content with the goal of creating a much more user-friendly experience.
Implementing an easy-to-use content management system
One of the key requirements for this project was the implementation of an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), which would allow Your Credit Union to manage all of its web content in-house. The CMS had to:
- Allow non-technical contributors to quickly and easily add content to the website.
- Include built-in membership registration and access levels for various areas of the website.
- Be scalable and expandable to support future website growth (such as the addition of extra modules and features)
- Be based on a freely available, open source platform with no licensing fees.
- Support a fully bilingual website.
Our Solution
Taking a thorough approach to project planning
RealDecoy’s expert project planning team thoroughly examined the existing web content, determining the most effective approach for streamlining the ways visitors would find information. This involved conducting a complete content audit of the current site, identifying redundant, outdated and trivial content and developing a new information architecture that would better address the needs of Your Credit Union.
RealDecoy then developed an interaction design consisting of paper based wireframe mock-ups for all of the pertinent and unique pages within the site. This allowed us to ensure that the navigation and site structure was both intuitive and scalable for the future needs of the site. During this process we also addressed issues of SEO, usability and writing for the web.
Your Credit Union was delighted with RealDecoy’s depth in planning and the way our team tackled the planning phase of this project.
Making the homepage a dynamic experience
The new credit union home page was built to include several dynamic areas, providing Your Credit Union with a great deal of flexibility. This included a ‘recent news’ section which displays the three most recent items from the ‘news releases’ section of the site.
OpenCMS technology
Based on their particular requirements RealDecoy recommended the use of OpenCMS as the content management solution. The advantages of OpenCMS included being open source with no licensing costs or proprietary rights limitations and an easy to use interface for non technically savvy users.
A website built to last
Due to RealDecoy’s web development expertise, Your Credit Union received an incredible return on its investment. The new site is easy to update and extremely flexible, and content can be added or removed easily by Credit Union staff. This level of scalability is crucial for smaller organizations, as a complete website redesign is a huge investment and needs to last for several years. Your Credit Union received exceptional value for its dollar by working with RealDecoy.
