Management Consultancies Association (MCA)

Management Consultancies Association (MCA) Website Design and Development

The Management Consultancies Association (MCA) has been the voice of the UK consulting sector since 1956. It’s purpose is to represent it members, such as PwC, Deloitte, EY, KPMG and IBM, in national conversations across both the private and public sectors as well as encourage the next generation of management consultants through their Young MCA network.

Their old website was built on an ageing platform (Expression Engine) and the design had not been refreshed for over four years. Added to that, the website was representative of the MCA today, its sixty plus members from the consultancy industry, and did not help to rapidly and efficiently convey key messaging, campaign related information or the aims of the Association itself.

The previous MCA website was not responsive (optimised for mobile and tablet) and as we are now seeing over 50% of visitors from mobile devices to some client’s websites resolving this quickly was an absolute priority to improve the both user experience and visitor impression of the MCA itself. The website was also built on an aging Content Management that was not providing the flexibility to allow the organisation to grow.

The proposal we put forward solved all of these issues.

What we did for the MCA

The MCA website redesign and rebuild was the first project the MCA and Strategies have worked together on so communication and understanding the needs of the customer was always going to be crucial. We started the project an initial kick off meeting as well as regular phone calls between the MCA and our dedicated project director. This led onto the production of a number of key planning documents including a new site structure and website migration plan.

Our objective was to design and build a new online presence for the MCA. The design of the new website had to be modern, clear, easy to navigate, authoritative and professional to reflect the values of the MCA and the industry. We wanted the homepage to be succinct and informative, giving visitors clear call-to-actions and was designed to be image led, visual, and be able to display videos.

The old website possessed a messy and overly complicated site structure so simplification and using common sense here was fundamental. The site structure and navigation was planned with input from MCA and to allow for a more logical user experience and better search engine optimisation. The website was structured around a clear narrative that leads visitors through the website in a logical fashion allowing them to browse and scan the content but also too pause and interrogate certain key sections for further information. Before launch our in-house SEO team went through every page optimising where necessary against an agreed set of keywords that results from Strategies initial planning and research. A thorough migration plan was implemented as launch to make sure that every old url was properly redirected to an equivalent new page to make sure that no traffic was lost and that keyword rankings were maintained.

We built the website using the WordPress platform which has the advantage of having fantastic design flexibility as well as being able to host extra functionality such as an eCommerce section for the reports and event ticket sales.

The overall result is a website that we are all very proud of and we feel that it is a big step forwards from the old website. It is focused on what maters to the MCA and their members and is now a real asset to the MCA which will help them to continue to represent their industry over the coming years.