The Challenge
The Retail Industry Leaders Association is the U.S. trade association for the country’s leading retailers. Its website was really 4 sites wearing one name: RILA itself, the Retail Compliance Center, the Retail Innovation Center, and the Retail Litigation Center, each with its own header, navigation, and look.
All 4 ran on a decade-old version of Kentico that was no longer supported, built in a tangled multi-tenant setup that made every change slow and risky. Visitors had to learn a different site every time they crossed into a division, and the association’s story was split 4 ways.
What I Did
I was the strategic lead, project manager, and account manager, and I led the BlueModus team of strategists, designers, developers, and QA through the rebuild.
- Set the direction: one RILA brand with the divisions as parts of it, not 4 neighbors sharing a domain.
- Led the creative: a single design system and a shared header that lets visitors move between divisions without leaving the site or relearning the layout.
- Re-architected the platform, moving off the unsupported multi-tenant build onto the current Kentico DXP, with the divisions managed in one place.
- Ran scope and delivery across a large project with stakeholders from every division, from discovery through launch.
- Built accessibility in from the start with a skip link, a proper page heading structure, and accessible contrast, labels, and alt text.
The Result
RILA now speaks with one voice. The 4 divisions live on one platform under one brand, and a visitor can move from policy news to the Litigation Center without feeling like they’ve left.
The new homepage also passes an automated WCAG 2.1 AA scan with no issues, against 42 on the old one, and scores 98 out of 100 for accessibility in Google Lighthouse.
