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Akron Bar Association unveils new, dynamic website
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: July 6, 2018
The Akron Bar Association has rolled out a new website with all of the upgraded bells and whistles that the modern Internet requires.
The new site provides a modern interface and powerful functionality to the association’s 1,300 members. It still has the same address: www.akronbar.com.but the upgrades are extensive enough that members will each need to re-access and reboot their individual accounts, said Janet Griffing-LaBonne, the bar association’s director of marketing and member services.
“It took over six months’ work from many people, and thousands of hours, but we are really proud of the new site,” said Griffing-LaBonne.
Griffing-LaBonne had primary responsibility for the development of the new site along with the association’s Executive Director C. Allen Nichols and Membership Director Thomas C. Petropoulos.
The site has an upgraded front page, a new user interface with links to member services and other functions, and a back page that gives the organization a number of powerful ways to administer the site and the association.
The site was designed in conjunction with MemberCentral (https://www.membercentral.com), a Texas company that specializes in creating association member websites with a particular emphasis on bar associations.
Griffing-LaBonne said that she and the other members of the development team had about three online meetings a week with their contact at MemberCentral, with each meeting lasting several hours.
After numerous design meetings, the Akron Bar team began its migration to the new site in January 2018. The migration took nearly six months, said Griffing-LaBonne. All of the data from the old site needed to be transferred over and then that data was enhanced with more information from other sources.
Numerous differences between the old site and the new reflect the upgraded data availability, said Griffing-LaBonne. One was a new ability to declare a member as being deceased, which helped a great deal in keeping the membership list accurate.
Another upgrade was the ability to merge duplicate listings. Griffing-LaBonne said that under the old system a new listing was potentially created every time a member registered for a seminar—creating dozens of duplicates for that member. The new system merged all of that information.
Another upgrade was the ability to track nonmembers.
“A lot of nonmembers attend out CLEs,” said Griffing-LaBonne. “Now we can track them as well.”
In all, the new site presents clearer ways to access data for both the administrators and the users.
The landing page now consists of three front pages, each of which contain different background photos featuring different sets of links.
The dropdown links on the front page have changed “very little,” said Griffing-LaBonne, but the real power of the new site lies just beneath the surface—particularly in a new section called “myakronbar.”
Myakronbar is “brand new,” Griffing-LaBonne said. It houses a very powerful new calendar capability, a new job and career center and links to various member services. Because it is a new function, it needs to be logged into anew if a member has not logged into her or his account since May 1. “Make sure you tell everyone that,” she said.
Myakronbar is designed to be a personal landing page for each member, loaded with professional information, a personal calendar, and more.
The new calendar is “more attractive, easier to use, and much more functional,” said Griffing-LaBonne. It connects to a personal calendar and a bar association calendar which allows a member to notify the bar if a vacation is coming up, schedule CLE’s and more.
Myakronbar will allow a member to register for CLEs, track previous CLEs, and create a list of all prior CLEs the member has ever taken, along with calculating CLE hours taken. It is also filled with Lawyer Referral and Information Service (LRIS) general and personal information.
The new site has document sharing functions “so that the bar can post documents directly to the membership,” said Griffing-LaBonne.
The new site has a function to create groups—“e-communities”-- which can share documents, photos, and a dedicated calendar. This function is currently being used by bar committees, sections and the board, Griffing-LaBonne said.
The administrator functions will allow numerous reports on everything from membership fee invoices and payments to member specialties, and will allow the bar to closely track member activities, said Griffing-LaBonne.
The new site is not quite done, said Griffing-LaBonne, and there is more to come. But the site is now functioning at a high enough level to be useful to members—as long as they sign into their accounts again.