Member portal design: one experience for two audiences

Why the disconnect happens

The reason prospect-facing sites and member portals feel different is almost always structural, not cosmetic. They were built at different times, on different platforms, with different goals. Patching that with design changes rarely works.

If the underlying architecture treats the two experiences as separate things, members will always feel the join.

What makes a real difference is designing both experiences simultaneously, from a single platform, with a shared design language and content logic that responds to who is actually looking at the page.

When that's done well, members don't notice the transition. They just notice that everything works.

What a dual-audience design looks like in practice

Start with authentication state, not page templates

Map what each user state needs to see before opening a design file. A prospect needs clear membership value and a frictionless path to joining, with no confusing member-only references. A member needs relevant content for their tier, contextual navigation, and visibility of benefits they're entitled to.

Every design decision flows from that mapping.

Use one design language across both experiences

Typography, colour, spacing, and component styles should feel identical whether someone is a prospect or a member. What changes is the content surfaced, the navigation available, and the actions presented.

It's tempting to let design standards relax in functional areas of the member portal. Resisting that is what produces an experience members actually respect.

Let navigation respond to membership status

Webflow's conditional visibility combined with Outseta's authentication means navigation items appear or disappear based on login state and membership tier. Prospects don't hit dead ends. Members aren't wading through content aimed at people who haven't joined yet.

Tie content visibility to membership tier

Beyond logged-in or logged-out, content should be relevant to each specific tier. A clear content matrix before build, mapping every content type against every user state, prevents the most common failure mode: decisions being made during build rather than before it.

What this approach actually delivers

Organisations that design both experiences simultaneously from one platform report a consistent outcome: members engage more because the platform feels built for them rather than adapted for them.

• Prospect conversion improves because the path to joining is unambiguous
• Member satisfaction improves because logging in delivers on what the public site promised
• Organisational credibility is reinforced at every touchpoint rather than undermined at the moment of highest engagement

For the Worshipful Company of International Bankers (WCIB), a City of London livery company, this meant prospects arriving at a clear membership proposition with no confusing navigation in their way, and members logging in to an environment that felt like a natural continuation of the same platform.

The architecture decisions that make it work

Authentication-aware content management

When Outseta authentication is implemented correctly within Webflow, the site knows each visitor's membership status, tier, and account state at every point. Content visibility, navigation, and available actions all respond to that state automatically.

This isn't a simple logged-in or logged-out toggle. It's membership-aware architecture that can distinguish between a prospect, a pending member, an active member at each tier, and a lapsed member, all from one CMS without duplicating pages.

Designing the transition moment

What happens immediately after a member logs in is the highest-stakes moment in the member experience. If the portal they land on is confusing or visually jarring, the damage to their perception is disproportionate to what actually went wrong.

Designing that landing experience with the same care as the homepage is worth the investment.

Maintaining design standards in functional areas

Member portals carry more functional weight than public-facing pages. Account management, billing history, event registration, and communication preferences all need to live somewhere. The temptation is to prioritise function and treat design as secondary.

The organisations with the strongest member experiences don't make that trade-off:

• Forms are styled consistently with the public site
• Error states are designed, not just functional
• Empty states are considered rather than accidental

Accessibility across both experiences

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance is often applied to the public site and inconsistently to the member portal. For organisations serving professionals across a range of ages and abilities, consistent accessibility across both environments is both a practical and reputational requirement. Building to standard from the start is significantly more efficient than retrofitting.

Why this is the right moment to get it right

Younger professionals joining membership organisations today have grown up with software that adapts to them. A member portal that feels generic or disconnected sits badly against that baseline expectation.

It doesn't need to match consumer software in sophistication. But it does need to feel intentional.

Getting the architecture right at the point of build is considerably more efficient than fixing it later. If your current member experience is creating friction you can't resolve with content changes, the underlying structure is usually the reason.

Ready to think through what a dual-audience design could look like for your organisation?

Book a discovery call and we'll explore how one integrated platform could serve your prospects and members without compromise.