Region 7 EMS

Region 7 EMS Council's previous site ran on Joomla, with a design and architecture that hadn't moved past the 90s. Navigation was a maze of nested sub-items within sub-items, and the site itself was largely static — there was no real separation between resources, news, updates, and general council information, so finding anything meant guessing which menu it might be buried in.

It was also a bottleneck internally. Non-technical team members struggled to update content, which meant information went stale and publishing new material was a slow, painful process rather than something the team could do on their own.

The council needed a rebuild that put navigation and findability first — a site where members could actually locate the resources they needed without digging through layers of menus.

We rebuilt the site from the ground up on a full CMS architecture, designed around clear navigation and a real distinction between resources, news, and council information.

The council also maintained several subsites for specialty teams. We recommended consolidating them into the main site — one property instead of several, which meant stronger SEO performance, more cross-team visibility for members browsing the site, and a much simpler publishing workflow for the team.

On the homepage, we built a rotating slider highlighting the council's top three focus areas, updated on a biweekly cadence — giving the council an easy way to keep the most important information front and center without touching the rest of the site.

To keep members engaged beyond a single visit, we also built a membership platform into the site. Members can register for sessions and events directly, manage their enrollments, and view their schedule anytime from a personal dashboard — turning the site into a tool members actually log back into, not just a resource they visit once.

Monthly traffic sessions grew from roughly 1,000 to 23,000 — a direct result of consolidating subsites, adding the membership platform, and making the site itself worth returning to.

The membership platform now has 800 active users, each with their own dashboard to register for sessions, manage enrollments, and track their schedule.

The site is now genuinely dynamic: news, resources, events, and sessions are updated almost daily, and members are coming back for it — both to catch new content and to manage their own event registrations. Average session duration sits at three and a half minutes, a strong signal that visitors are finding and engaging with content rather than bouncing off a static page.