Managing memberships, comms & marketing.
A new site to enable better marketing management
What did The APMA need?
The APMA is the UK’s only trade body dedicated to affiliate and partner marketing. Launched in 2023, the association needed a website that could act as the central destination for an entire industry.
A trade body website is doing several things at once. It needs to be credible enough to attract new members, useful enough to retain existing ones, and structured to support the commercial activity – memberships, events, research, training – that funds the organisation’s work. All of that needs to be manageable by a small internal team.
The existing site was not reliable, not flexible, and not doing justice to an organisation with genuine ambitions around growth, SEO and member value. It was limiting rather than enabling.
The brief was to build a proper platform: a WordPress site that could handle multiple membership tiers, support ongoing content production across white papers, research, guides and news, accommodate future gated content and virtual product sales, and serve as the go-to destination for the UK affiliate industry for years to come.
What the site needed to do:
- Support multiple membership tiers with the ability to offer gated and exclusive content as the association grows
- Handle membership purchases and virtual product sales through WooCommerce
- Act as a central content hub for white papers, research, guides, news and industry resources
- Build credibility and discoverability for an association that is still establishing itself in search
- Give a small internal team full control over day-to-day content without developer dependency
Our approach
Project overview
An evolution of the existing site rather than a complete rebuild. Existing brand assets retained. Bespoke WordPress and WooCommerce platform built for a membership organisation with a growing commercial offering and serious content ambitions.
Design
- Existing brand assets – logo, colours and typography – retained and evolved rather than replaced
- Layout consistency and accessibility improved across all templates
- Design improvements maintain continuity for existing members while raising the overall standard
- Responsive and performance-optimised across all modern devices from launch
Membership and ecommerce
- Multiple membership tiers supported with the ability to gate content and offer exclusive member resources
- WooCommerce handles membership purchases and supports future virtual product sales – training packages, research papers and similar
- Member login area, contact forms, newsletters and content downloads all supported
- Platform designed to expand commercially as the association’s offering develops
WordPress build
Bespoke build on our own custom starter theme. Purpose-built ACF content blocks give the APMA team full control over the site day to day – no developer involvement needed for publishing research, news, guides or updating member-facing content. For a small team running a busy trade body, that independence is not optional.
SEO and content
Page structure, performance and internal linking built to SEO best practice from the start. The site is designed for ongoing content production – white papers, research, industry guides and news all structured for discoverability. For an association building authority in search from a standing start, the foundations matter as much as the content.
A trade body or membership organisation?
If you need a platform that handles membership, content, commercial products and a growing community – all managed by a small team – we should talk.
Tell us where you are and we will tell you what the right platform looks like.
The results
92/100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
Scalable
Membership tiers, gated content, virtual product sales and future functionality all accommodated as the association grows
100%
Of content manageable by the APMA team – research, news, guides and member content all published without developer involvement
Reliable
Replacing a site that was not functioning reliably – a stable, properly built platform the association can depend on
Ready
SEO foundations and content architecture in place from launch – structured for building authority in search from a standing start
Central
The go-to destination for the UK affiliate industry – a platform the association can build on for years
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. That discipline is what makes the performance scores possible.
WooCommerce
Membership purchases and virtual product sales handled through WooCommerce – the same engine we use for physical ecommerce, applied here to memberships, training packages and research papers. The commercial layer is built into the platform from the start, not added as an afterthought when the association decides to sell something.
Plugins and functionality
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. Contact forms, member login areas, newsletters, content downloads and media embeds all supported – the full functional range a membership association needs, without unnecessary plugin bloat.
SEO and content architecture
Page structure, performance and internal linking configured to SEO best practice throughout. The content architecture – dedicated sections for research, news, guides and member resources – is built for discoverability as well as usability. An association building search authority from a standing start needs the technical foundations to be right from day one.
Why WordPress was the right platform for The APMA.
A trade body website is a content platform, a membership system, a commercial product catalogue and a credibility signal – all in one. Most platforms are good at one of those things.
WordPress with WooCommerce handles all four. The content architecture supports ongoing publication of research, white papers, guides and news – the kind of material that builds search authority and member value over time. WooCommerce manages membership tiers, handles purchases and is already set up to sell training packages or research papers when the association is ready to do that. The member login area, content gating and download functionality are all built on the same platform, not bolted in from a separate system.
For a young association – The APMA was launched in 2023 – the platform also needs to be one that grows with the organisation rather than one they outgrow. The previous site was already limiting them. A Wix or similar approach would have created the same problem further down the road.
The other argument is reliability. The previous site was not functioning reliably. For a trade body whose credibility depends in part on presenting itself professionally online, an unreliable website is not a minor inconvenience. A properly built WordPress site on good hosting, maintained correctly, is stable. That is the baseline.
