Ontario Veterinary Medical Association

OVMA turned to Inorbital to redesign and rebuild their website and intranet portal. The project was to include strategy, information architecture, UX research, design, and development. The association required a modern solution with an easy-to-use and intuitive interface that would enable a user-centric approach and make it easy for content editors to do their jobs.  

Challenges 

OVMA’s existing site was built over a decade ago using a proprietary CMS. It was outdated, hindering user experience and accessibility, and had become increasingly difficult to manage and maintain.  

The site structure made it difficult for users to locate important material, as content was often buried and its layout was rigid and text-heavy. 

The main menu was cluttered with a mix of gated and non-gated pages, causing confusion and frustrations when users were directed to an external site for member login. 

The classifieds section—a major revenue source for the association—required multiple emails back and forth with prospective advertisers. 

Additionally, news and events were not clearly distinguished, and critical documents for members were dispersed through emails rather than being centralized in a resource library.  

Over time, the extensive menu system only contributed to further disorganization. 

Project goals included: 

• Reimagining the information architecture 

• Enhancing user experience 

• Making the website easy to update and manage 

• Creating members-only portal to house members-only content 

• Improving admin features of the locums bank and classified sections 

The obvious solution was Kentico. 

Solution

Kentico enabled Inorbital to completely overhaul the website’s information architecture.  

Inorbital started with a comprehensive content audit, guided by user needs and organizational goals. As a result, the team identified numerous opportunities to enhance the menu and overall navigation and simplify finding specific content. Additionally, by isolating members-only content from the main navigation and placing it in a separate menu, they significantly streamlined the user experience and decluttered the navigation system. 

The Inorbital team leveraged the built-in tools and flexibility of Kentico to build a solution that met OVMA’s precise needs. 

• Kentico Page Builder: Enabled the creation of templates tailored to the design. 

• Custom widgets: Integrated seamlessly with layouts, dynamically populating related content based on the content type. 

• Custom tables: Stored form control options to facilitate filtering and tagging of content in the classified and locums bank sections. 

• Custom modules: Provided advanced administrative controls, including: 

• Sorting and reviewing ad requests 

• Calculating costs 

• Generating dynamic PDF receipts 

• Sending automated and manually triggered emails 

• Users application: Managed user data and controlled access, displaying appropriate content based on user permissions. 

Results

The OVMA project launched on April 8th 2024 and has already received overwhelmingly positive reviews from both the members that it serves and the team managing it.  

Thanks to Kentico, Inobital were able to build out all the required aspects of the new site and leverage the platform to build custom modules that were specific to OVMA’s needs.   

The new website maximizes control for content editors with Kentico’s easy-to-use Page builder and a series of drag-and-drop widgets that simplify content management. These widgets combined with the use of structured content provides editors with easy customizable layouts as well as an organized structure for repeated pages, with no setup needed. 

The website has not just met OVMA’s expectations, but far exceeded them.  

Statistics 

Compared to the same period last year, in the first two months of the site being launched, it achieved: 

• 31% increase in event counts (and increase of 44,000 to 143,000) 

• 12.4% decrease in bounce rates (from 49.6% to 37.2%)