Improved member service with the new website

The website, which is the focal point of Svensk Handel's communications, has been given a revised design, enhanced information structure, new member pages with fresh content and a range of new features to help simplify everyday life for its members, as well as for its partner companies.

Improve member service with dialogue

The website's main purposes are to improve member service, increase member recruitment, create public opinion, and improve efficiency. Svensk Handel's primary role is to support its members by providing them with membership services and representing their interests.
The new website creates a dialogue with its members to identify and reconcile the issues that are a matter of interest. It also invites an exchange of ideas between its members. The website also highlights Svensk Handel's PR work on behalf of its members through continuous information delivery of the organization's activities.

Userfriendly tools

The website's priority target groups are small and medium-sized member companies, press and media as well as politicians and educational institutions. The website provides its users with tools that can support them in their work and through answering a large proportion of questions that currently go to other channels within Svensk Handel, for example, the members' hotline.
Advocacy is one of Svensk Handel's priorities and as a result the press and media are a target group. The website is the natural channel to the world and can disseminate information out to the press about key matters, such as collective bargaining.

There is a strong word-of-mouth recommendation to Svensk Handel which drives traffic to their website, and the high proportion of first-time visitors are quickly identified as potential members.

Integration and search

Integration was done with Svenskt Näringsliv's membership directory. The members of Svensk Handel can register themselves on the website by entering their company's corporate identity number and membership number.

The membership is verified against Svenskt Näringsliv's membership directory, and further information is fetched. This is built with a modular and layered architecture that makes it easy to make changes of both smaller and larger nature. One modification would, for instance, be to integrate with other systems.

Much work has also been put into the website's search functionality. Good search results are delivered by Google Mini, which continuously indexes both the public parts of the website and the member pages.

Properties

AJAX functionality with state management is used and complete page updates are avoided. When suitable the current state is saved in a hash tag that is injected into the URL so that the back and forward buttons still work. For all functions where AJAX is used there is also a fallback mechanism so that they still work even though the visitor has javascript disabled or if the visitor is a spider from a search engine. Of course the visitor will always get visual feedback while an AJAX request is made. This feature is very much present on the member pages, but can also be seen in the calendar and to some extent in the calculation of member benefits.

Editable 404-page

The website's 404-page can be administered by an EPiServer editor. The editor can also set some URLs to be permanently redirected to new pages. The 404-page also contains a search field that will be completed in advance with the search term that was used by visitors from search engines. More about this solution is available at EPiServer Labs.

Client side performance optimization

To a large extent we have followed Yahoo's best practices for performance which means that we have kept the number of HTTP requests down, only held View State when necessary, minimized javascript, etc. and made use of CSS sprites. There are three CSS sprite maps on svenskhandel.se. These three images containing a total of some 60 different background images dramatically lowers the number of HTTP requests made to the server. We have also used the EPiServer CDN-support module to set expiration headers for static files and for loading static files from a separate domain.

We have developed an intuitive way for editors to work with Google maps. By using the Nansen Developed EPiServer property GoogleMapsLocation editors can specify addresses or coordinates which are then displayed using Google Maps.