OPA’s Website Overhaul
for Stronger Engagement
The Ontario Physiotherapy Association (OPA) is a prominent healthcare professional organisation, representing more than 5,500 physiotherapists, physiotherapist assistants (PTAs), and students across the province. As the largest branch of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA), OPA is dedicated to driving the profession forward and ensuring everyone in Ontario has access to high-quality physiotherapy. Guided by its vision, "Ontarians are Healthier and Stronger through Physiotherapy," OPA commits to leadership in the field through advocacy, professional development, and career support services for its members. As a non-profit, PT-led association, OPA's leaders, staff, and volunteers work tirelessly for their members.
Project Summary
OPA approached Inorbital to re-design and re-build their website, seeking a modern platform to enhance engagement and address declining membership rates. The previous site, built on an older version of WordPress, needed a comprehensive overhaul to become more member-focused, user-friendly, and geared towards news publication. OPA had already collaborated with SalesLoop to establish a new site structure and functionality vision. Inorbital was engaged to implement this design vision, providing expertise in strategy, information architecture, UX research, design, and development.
Goals
Redesign and redevelop the site based on a new site structure that transitions from a static page content format to a dynamic post publication site for news, events, shop, professional development, and advocacy. The new design was to incorporate a variety of templates and flexible page layouts.
Implement Tagging Systems within posts to facilitate automatic publishing to relevant site pages. This included building many widgets that included tag selectors to display feeds of relevant content based on the page. .
Integrate E-commerce Functionality for online sales and the publication of job, course, and classified listings (marketplace ads) with preview capabilities.
Integrations with OPA, CPA, and other third-party services, including member login. .
Empower OPA Staff with 100% internal control over content creation, editing, and publishing for all content, pages, posts, and shop products.
Challenges
The existing website was built on an older version of WordPress, using the 'Avada' theme, which presented limitations for modern functionality and content management. A key challenge in this project was to make the content editing experience easier for administrators and unlocking the power of Wordpress by building a custom theme, custom widgets specific to the design without the reliance on third party plugins to work.
Our Approach
Custom WordPress Theme and Widgets
We designed and developed a fully custom WordPress theme built from the ground up to support unique layouts, tagging systems, and content widgets, all seamlessly integrated with the Gutenberg drag-and-drop editor. We also implemented advanced administrative tools for member and e-commerce management, creating a flexible, future-ready platform aligned with OPA’s long-term goals.
To enhance the content editing experience, we built custom widgets with intuitive settings tabs that allow editors to control layouts, apply theming, and override defaults by selecting content directly from a modal window. This approach provided OPA with a powerful yet user-friendly system for managing their website that exceeded their expectations and greatly improved the content editing experience of WordPress.
Example of custom developed widget settings that allow editors to select a feed of tags to display content within the widget. These settings also include a manual override where if choose individual news to display is selected we built an interface in a modal window for editors to pick any articles they want
Example of a modal window developed within the widget settings that allows editors to manually select content to display. This example shows the "Quick Links" widget but this functionality exists on other editing widgets as well.
Example of theming settings that were also included in the widget. You can see OPA has 9 different themes to their widgets as well as different styling options.
Conclusion
By partnering with Inorbital and leveraging a fully custom WordPress theme with advanced content widgets, OPA transformed its digital presence to better serve members and prospective members. The new website aligns with OPA’s mission to strengthen Ontario’s physiotherapy community by tailoring content and communications to distinct member types. The platform not only streamlines operations and empowers staff with complete control over content but also positions OPA for sustained engagement, growth, and innovation in the digital space.
For more information, visit https://www.opa.on.ca/.
