A 1,000-page rebuild with a searchable map of 800 members

The problem

New Hampshire Made represents hundreds of makers, farms, shops, and restaurants across the state. Its old site had grown past a thousand pages, the member directory was a flat list nobody could search usefully, and every membership renewal and profile change came back to staff as an email to be typed in by hand.

They also had a robust set of member products to sell online, but wanted those products integrated with the member profiles. Variations were important as well, and they needed a more efficient and flexible fulfillment system. And they wanted a way for members to renew their membership online.

What I did

I rebuilt the site with a member directory as its spine, in collaboration with a graphic designer and project manager from Steadman Media Group.

• A filterable map of more than 800 members, searchable by category and region, so a visitor looking for a cidery within an hour’s drive could find one. And each profile was linked to any products from that member in the store catalog.
• Self-editing member profiles, which took the single largest recurring task off staff hands. Members updated their own hours, photos, and descriptions.
• A payment gateway wired to membership dues and the online store, so renewals stopped being an invoice-and-chase cycle.
• A private member area for materials that weren’t public.
• A migration of more than a thousand existing pages without breaking the inbound links the organization had spent years earning.

The result

The directory became the reason people visited the site rather than a page buried in the navigation. Staff stopped hand-entering member changes. And online store purchases and membership renewals went way more smoothly. The site ran as the organization’s primary public presence for seven years, until NH Made restructured in 2021.