The Verse - Volume Three

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Success Story - KCMBA

Three years ago, Rae Jean McCall, Executive Director of the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association (KCMBA), oversaw a process of re-branding for the 120 year-old association serving Greater Kansas City's legal community. A new logo, new printed materials and a desire to revamp the KCMBA web site were the results. Unfortunately, the web site would have to wait.

KCMBA wanted to increase communication with its members and make its weekly newsletters available on the Web. Their web site, which was designed in July of 1999, was old (according to experts, the typical shelf life of a web site is somewhere between two to three years), tough to update and maintenance was cumbersome at best.

In early 2004, Versent had the good fortune to become KCMBA's affinity partner for technology. Soon after, Versent Director of Development and original purple guy Jason Terry started a project to redesign the KCMBA web site. KCMBA wanted an updated look and feel, a web site that would be easy for non-technical staff members to update and maintain and wanted the web site to be constructed with future expansion in mind.

KCMBA also had a budget they wanted to stay within and were willing to do whatever work they could to keep costs down. Jason was able to create the web site architecture and assist the KCMBA staff, who loaded content into hundreds of web pages.

"Jason was very good to work with," Rae Jean said, "he met with the staff, talked through ideas and then took those ideas and made them work." The new www.kcmba.org went live in late March and so far the feedback from members has been great. However, this is just the start as KCMBA plans to continue to work with Jason to bring great new web site features and functionality to its membership in the future.