Parachute Industry Association
Honoring an Organization with a Rich History
In 2019, Beyond Marketing won the bid to design a new website for the Parachute Industry Association, and we were stoked about it! This project was tailor-made for us as we are familiar with the organization, its mission and values, and its membership (we’re members ourselves).
PIA’s requirements to us were to accomplish the following:
- Improve PIA’s brand perception online
- Showcase the organization’s diverse membership
- Offer an e-commerce solution for 500+ downloads
- Combine two websites into one
- Allow quick and easy navigation to high-traffic pages
- Create a multi-faceted search feature
- Showcase PIA history and member achievements
- Communicate membership benefits; clear calls to action
- Highlight/advertise PIA’s largest event (PIA Symposium)
The Layout
PIA represents many different facets of the parachuting industry from riggers, military organizations, dropzones and manufacturers. The website needed to represent everyone.
With web design trends no longer favoring sliding images in the hero because of their potential to distract from the overall user experience, we had to be strategic with our use of photography. Using a single static image couldn’t possibly embody the multiple facets of the organization, so we used three separate images to showcase the industry today as a whole – riggers, manufacturers and, of course, skydivers.
With data revealing which pages historically received the most traffic, we equipped the end-user with the ability to quickly access those pages without having to utilize the main navigation structure. Each element beyond this image menu was focused on a hierarchy of needs, from the value proposition of PIA membership to its members, events and news.
E-Commerce
The largest component of the PIA website is the e-commerce store which contains more than 500 downloadable products in the form of specs and standards. The old website had some hiccups with user experience, which necessitated a lot of hands-on work for PIA’s administration team. The new site streamlined the experience for both the PIA admin team and, of course, the end user.
Honoring Rich History
The PIA website was a pleasure for our team to create – we were designing for an amazing group of people who put their trust in us to meet their unique needs while honoring the organization’s rich history. All told, Beyond Marketing’s web design team invested in excess of 250 hours and shared more than 400 e-mails with PIA’s Marketing committee to get every nuanced detail just right.
