Organization Overview

• The Endocrine Society (www.endo-society.org) is the world's oldest, largest, and most active organization devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology. The Society was founded in 1916 and is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
  

• The Endocrine Society has more than 14,000 members from over 100 countries.
  

• The organization publishes four journals and a monthly news magazine, and has an annual meeting with more than 7,500 attendees.

Situation

• The Endocrine Society's website had an outdated design and site architecture.
  
• Making changes to the more than 12,000 page website had become very difficult and time-consuming, overburdening its Web development team and creating a backlog of work. As a result, the website was chronically outdated and the organization was beginning to miss opportunities.
  
• Although the organization used the CommonSpot Web content management solution to manage its Web content, the website featured many long outdated, custom-built applications that were never fully integrated into CommonSpot. These applications made the website architecture overly complex and troublesome to update.
  
• Furthermore, the Web server that hosted the website was old and overburdened by increases in site visitors and activity.

Business Challenge

• The Endocrine Society wanted to completely re-design and re-architect its website and needed the expertise of a Web design and development firm to help complete the project.
  
• The organization needed to re-write all of the custom-built applications not yet fully integrated with CommonSpot but lacked a sufficient budget to do so.
  
• Content from the more than 12,000 pages of the website needed to be re-organized and migrated to the new website design once completed.

Solution

• The Endocrine Society selected PaperThin partner Digital Division to complete the website redesign and redevelopment project. Because Digital Division is a full-service Web design and development firm, the organization was able to work with a single point of contact throughout the initial design and project planning stage. This ensured that the Web design and updated sitemap was created in a way that would be optimal for CommonSpot deployment.
  
• Digital Division's Web design team collaborated with the Endocrine Society's communication team to develop the new site design.
  
• Once completed, the website and its extensive databases were migrated to updated Web and database servers.
  
• Digital Division then leveraged the flexibility within CommonSpot to easily integrate with a best of breed search application—Google Mini Search—for fast searching and indexing of the website's extensive content without impacting site performance.
  
• Digital Division worked with the Endocrine Society to determine a technical strategy for redeploying newly created custom applications and recycling some of the existing ones in an organized and consistent manner.

• Now that content is more organized and applications have been migrated to CommonSpot, business users are able to easily manage Web content, eliminating the Web developer bottleneck and improving productivity organization-wide.
  
• Rather than simply managing Web content, the Endocrine Society's Web development team is now able to focus on innovation as well as improving the organization's extensive online communications.
  
• Website performance has improved greatly due to the updated site architecture, faster servers, and optimized databases.
  
• The website is also primed for growth in terms of changes to the organization, growth in membership, as well as growth in site visitor traffic.
  
• Future site design changes can now be quickly, easily and seamlessly deployed using the new design templates created within CommonSpot.
  
• The Endocrine Society's new website is a big hit with not only its members, but also its staff and board of directors.