LABC

Overview

LABC is the membership organisation representing local authority building control departments across England and Wales. Founded in 2005, it serves around 3,500 building control surveyors and technicians, as well as a wider audience of building professionals and industry bodies.

The organisation needed a new website to replace both its public-facing site and a separate members portal, bringing everything into a single, modern platform capable of serving a diverse audience, handling thousands of event bookings a year, and giving members access to a rich library of technical guidance and professional development resources.

The challenge

LABC's digital presence had grown across two separate sites, labc.co.uk and a dedicated members portal, and the infrastructure underpinning both had reached the limits of what it could support. With around 180,000 page views per month, over 12,000 member accounts, and a busy events and courses programme generating upwards of 4,900 bookings a year, the new site needed to be robust, scalable, and genuinely easy to manage.

The brief was ambitious. It asked for a public-facing site and a fully integrated members area in a single platform, with a searchable document library, a bilingual English and Welsh experience, an events and courses booking system with multiple payment options, and a postcode-based local authority search tool. Accessibility was a hard requirement throughout, with WCAG 2.1 AA compliance a baseline expectation for an organisation that promotes standards in the built environment.

What we built

The site is built on Craft CMS, giving LABC a single platform to manage both public and member-only content, with clearly defined user roles and permissions across different teams. The public site and members area share a common foundation but present differently, with distinct design and navigation for authenticated members.

Over 12,000 existing member accounts were migrated from the previous site into Craft CMS's user management system, preserving continuity for the membership while moving to a modern, maintainable platform.

The events and courses section was built to handle the volume and complexity LABC required, supporting multiple attendees per booking, filterable event listings, and three payment routes: bank transfer, online payment via SagePay, and member credits for qualifying members. Booking data can be exported as CSV for direct import into Sage accounting software.

Site search is powered by Algolia, indexing not just page content but the full text of PDFs, Word documents and Excel files hosted in the document library. A custom document management system within Craft CMS handles versioning, with live and archived versions of regulatory documents clearly distinguished and cross-linked.

Welsh language support is built natively into Craft CMS's multi-site architecture, with a language toggle throughout the site and content managed directly by the LABC team without any external translation tools.

Ongoing support, maintenance and updates

We continue to support the LABC team on an ongoing basis, managing CMS and plugin updates, security patches, hosting and technical maintenance across a high-traffic site with a complex feature set, keeping the platform stable, secure and up to date as it evolves.

The result

The new LABC site brings together what were previously two separate platforms into a single, coherent digital home for the organisation and its members. The combination of a capable CMS, a well-structured members area, and a robust events and booking platform gives LABC the tools to support its membership and grow its offering without being constrained by its website.