co-operative.coop

We’ve made co-operative.coop better

mikebracken4 Comments

Today we’ve released a new improved version of co-operative.coop. Previously, if you went to coop.co.uk or co-operative.coop you would see exactly the same content. Not anymore. They’re now 2 separate websites, each supporting different needs.

We’ve split up the content so that:

  • coop.co.uk is the way to access our products and services
  • co-operative.coop is the way you can find out how our co-operative is working and how you can get involved with it   

Fixing the basics

The new co-operative.coop fixes a lot of the basics. The new site is:

  • responsive – it works well on mobile, tablets and laptops
  • fast – it takes less than a second to load a page compared with 6.5 seconds on the old site
  • secure – it uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) when loading a web page which means that when you use some web browsers you see a green padlock

This is important because next month the Chrome web browser will highlight non HTTPS sites as not being secure.

The content’s better too

All the changes above are the features you’d expect on any modern website. Like we said, they’re the basics. The biggest change we’ve made is the content. It’s very easy to create a lot of content but it’s much harder work to create good, concise content. For this reason we’ve removed hundreds of pages so that the content meets the needs of the people using the site.

We’re not finished

Changing to co-operative.coop is just the start. The improvements will be ongoing. Previously an external company looked after the site for us which meant only occasional changes.

Our new site was built by our in-house team. They work in an agile way. We ask for feedback at the bottom of each page which means the team is continually listening to our members and anyone else using the site. 

Feedback prompt on each page asks site visitors to tell us what they liked or what we can improve'

Doing things ourselves and working in this way means we can iterate quickly, and often. Making it better every time we make a change. 

We’ve worked with our Group Secretariat, consulted our Members’ Council and have shown the new site to the Digital Working Group on several occasions. Thank you to all.

Our team shows members of the Digital Working Group our work co-operative.coop in Federation house

Thanks also to Peter Brumby and all the team who’ve made this happen.

We’re going to continue to work together to improve the new site for our members.

Mike Bracken
Chief Digital Officer

Nick Crofts
President of National Members’ Council