The National Music Publishers’ Association
The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA.org) is an organization that supports American songwriters, publishers, and their respective partners. At the start of this project, the website acted as a repository for news and organizational information but did not portray the vibrancy and spirit of the cutting-edge artists the organization represents–or the energy and dedication of NMPA’s staff.
While the site was a resource for news and information, ambiguous headlines and a lack of organization obfuscated the source of the information, and it wasn’t clear why it was important to the user.
From a technology perspective, the publishing stack was overly-complex and prone to failure. The site was built on a dated version of WordPress with multiple plugin conflicts, and updates rarely happened because the system was difficult to use.
These issues prevented NMPA from featuring the Gold & Platinum program in a way that communicated the relevance of their award-winning artists. While the team was able to update the Gold & Platinum listing, that effort required multiple spreadsheets and data transformations by non-technical users. The process was fraught with errors and unexplained timeouts.
Beekeeper Group and the NMPA team worked together to develop several solutions to be implemented during the website design process.
In rethinking the front-end presentation, we learned that NMPA has an ever-evolving treasure trove of images from their highly-produced events that feature cutting-edge artists and demonstrate the work of the organization. Beekeeper Group developed a new color palette to complement these images, and built a design that featured this imagery throughout the site while maintaining visual hierarchy and a professional look and feel with proportional headings and accent colors.
Organizing the information architecture of the site was a challenge. NMPA must communicate a variety of messages–it was critical to provide ways to highlight advocacy messaging, elevate industry news around the artists they represent, and feature their nonprofit outreach work. Beekeeper Group worked with the NMPA team to overhaul the sitemap so that each type of information had a clear home in the backend.
Beekeeper Group’s team of experienced technology professionals revised the user experience to reflect the organization’s priorities. The homepage was designed to leverage NMPA’s compelling imagery to focus users on the carousel, and, preferably, orient and drive them into deeper level content immediately. There is a deliberate contrast in the design of inner pages–most that focus on narrative and text content are intentionally minimal, while others that feature programs or organization highlights use additional layers of design to stand out during the user’s journey.
Creating the right set of custom post types (as defined during the site mapping phase) for the backend immediately made the process of publishing content much more straightforward. We also built out a new photo gallery function, customizing it to fit the workflow of the NMPA team, as opposed to making them fit their processes to the technology.
We transitioned the Gold & Platinum update processes away from the multiple spreadsheets and JSON files by moving the nearly 30,000 record database to Airtable, where it is now managed. Connecting WordPress with the APIs provided by Airtable, the import process now requires one upload (of the source data) and one click to run the import via the APIs.
Comparing six months of pre- vs post-launch data:
– Bounce rate decreased by 18.9%
– Organic search traffic increased by 9.6%
– Visitors to the Gold & Platinum page increased from less than 50 to over 10,000
Updates to the Gold & Platinum database take minutes instead of hours, allowing the NMPA team more time to update the website and build out new content, image galleries and entire sections. Before the redesign, the website was updated semi-regularly, one to two times a month. With the revised workflow and decreased friction with the publishing tools that Beekeeper built, the site is updated at least weekly, communicating a vibrant and active organization that supports today’s music creators.
As a result of the work our team put into this redesign, NMPA was recognized as a 2021 Davey Award and won Gold for the category of Website Redesign.
