Celebrants Australia is the leading association for all types of registered and authorised celebrants within Australia. The organisation facilitates ongoing Personal Development for its members and holds business meetings throughout the year to ensure their members are kept up to date with the latest regulations in the industry.
The purpose of the project was to replace their existing website which originally dated back to 2006. The project was to create a modern website that looked professional, was fast loading, responsive on mobile devices and, importantly, it needed to be extremely easy for the committee to maintain.
After a conversation with the President of the association, we realised that the directory of Celebrants was the most important area of the site, and that the order the celebrants were displayed needed some special attention — we needed to ensure all celebrants had an opportunity to be presented at the “top of the list”.
At first thought, we were going to present the list of celebrants in a randomly order each time the page loaded, but we saw issues with the site usability - this would have meant visitors who wanted to drop in and out of the directory pages would have found the celebrants had shuffled around each time the page was re-loaded, so we needed to find a better process. The outcome was to develop a sort order based on the proximity of the celebrant to the visitor. We used modern Geolocation services found in smartphones and modern desktop computers to achieve this, and then we saved the order of the directory for a period of two weeks at a per user basis. This was all completed securely and anonymously without requiring the visitor to log into the site..
In addition to providing a great directory experience on the website, we also provided the capacity for new celebrants to join and pay their membership fees online - a first for the Celebrants Association.