Winner: National Beer Wholesalers Association—NBWA Website
The National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA)—which represents the country’s 3,300 licensed, independent beer distributors—recently completed a successful (and now award-winning) redesign of the association’s website.
NBWA staff identified that a redesign of the association’s website—www.nbwa.org—was necessary to keep up with advances in mobile technology and improve navigation to its membership resources. NBWA worked with its Web development company—NJI Media—to kick off the website design project in 2014, with a target launch in 2015.
A soft launch of the site occurred at the end of February 2015, which provided ample time to make any necessary adjustments before the 2015 NBWA Legislative Conference in April, one of the association’s two full membership meetings each year. NBWA used that conference as an opportunity to unveil the new site first to its membership—the site’s primary audience.
NBWA continued to promote the site to its primary audience, along with its secondary and tertiary audiences, throughout the month of May. NBWA communicated to membership by email, ran ads promoting the new site in The Daily Brew (the associations’ daily email newsletter), customized its social media cover photos to advertise the site and issued a national press release to alert both trade and mainstream media of the new site and the resources offered by NBWA.
NJI Media compared site metrics for the legacy NBWA website and the redesigned site for the same three-month period (July 20-October 20) and results included the fact that total page views from the new site increased by 44.3% from the total number of page views the legacy site received during the same time frame, indicating that the new site has met the objective of increasing awareness of NBWA and America’s beer distributors.
Honorable Mention:
• Georgia Aquarium - 2015 Website Redesign