ACPOHE

The Client

The Association of Chartered Physiotherapists in Occupational Health and Ergonomics (ACPOHE) is the UK’s professional network for physiotherapists working in occupational health. Its members range from practising Chartered physiotherapists to students, associate professionals and international members, all supported through training, a professional directory and a national community.

Like a lot of membership bodies, ACPOHE is run by a committee doing this alongside their day jobs, with no in-house developer. That shapes everything. The platform behind the membership has to do the heavy lifting, because the people running it do not have time to chase renewals or wrangle a difficult content management system.

"We now have a website and membership system that works the way we need it to, something we couldn't say about our old site. That's down to great communication and project management from The Digital Maze throughout, and a team that stayed on it until everything was right."

Alex Bell, ACPOHE

The Challenge

ACPOHE’s existing site was hosted and controlled by a third party. That meant limited flexibility, a dated design, and a sign-up process that had not kept pace with what the organisation needed. Six different membership tiers, each with its own eligibility rules, had to be supported online for the first time, and most of them needed manual verification before a member could be approved.

The membership rebuild was the core of it, but there was more to solve:

A move onto ACPOHE’s own domain, fully independent of the third party, without breaking existing links or losing search visibility.
A public, searchable directory of registered Chartered physiotherapists.
A straightforward way to manage renewals, failed payments and lapsed memberships, without manual chasing.
A content-managed home for courses and webinars, with a clean link out to ACPOHE’s existing
Learning Management System (LMS).
A CMS simple enough for a committee with no developer to run day to day, without coming back to us for routine changes.

Our Approach

We pitched for the work in November 2025, were appointed later that month, and onboarded ACPOHE in December before designing through early 2026. From the start this was a project with a lot of moving parts for a small committee to manage, so we broke it into clear workstreams and kept the client close at every stage.

Website design and a block-based CMS

We designed and built a new WordPress site with a custom block-based CMS. The point of the blocks is control: the committee can edit pages, add courses and manage members themselves, without needing a developer for routine changes. Fast, secure and straightforward to run.

A membership system for all six tiers

We rebuilt the membership system to support every tier and its eligibility rules. Standard members get self-serve sign-up and payment through Stripe. Tiers that need checking follow a clear manual approval path, so the committee stays in control of who gets approved without the process becoming a bottleneck.

Automated renewals and billing

Renewals now run through WooCommerce Subscriptions, with retry logic and dunning emails for failed payments. Chasing lapsed and failed renewals by hand was a significant admin burden. That burden is now handled by the platform.

A member dashboard, invoices and certificates

Every member gets a private dashboard showing their tier and expiry date, where they can download invoices and receipts and access a membership certificate generated automatically. It answers the routine member questions before they reach the committee’s inbox.

A public physio directory

We built a public directory with postcode-based search, replacing the old directory link. For the first time, ACPOHE owns member visibility outright rather than relying on someone else’s system to surface its physiotherapists.

Courses, webinars and a pragmatic LMS approach

Rather than rebuilding ACPOHE’s existing LMS, we linked out to it and used WordPress to manage the course and webinar listings. That kept cost and complexity down and put the money where it mattered, on the membership platform itself.

Migration onto ACPOHE’s own domain

We moved the site off the subdomain onto ACPOHE’s own domain for the first time, with a full 301 redirect strategy to protect existing search rankings. We coordinated the DNS changes with the third party’s IT team so the handover happened without downtime.

We also worked through the detail that makes the difference in a build like this. We reviewed every image on the site for genuine, varied representation of physiotherapists and the people they support, rather than defaulting to stock cliches. And we ironed out the sign-up and payment edge cases during a live testing period, including invoice downloads, password resets and default country settings, before
opening registration to the wider membership.

The Result

The site went live in June 2026. ACPOHE now has a single platform it owns outright: membership,
renewals, the physio directory and course content, all managed from one WordPress site, with no
dependency on someone else’s infrastructure.

Six membership tiers that once required manual admin work are now supported with automated sign-up, payment and renewal flows.
Failed payments and lapsed renewals are handled by the platform, removing a significant admin burden from a committee that runs this alongside their day jobs.
Members self-serve through a dashboard that shows their tier and expiry, and lets them download invoices, receipts and an automatically generated certificate.
A public, postcode-searchable physio directory gives ACPOHE full ownership of member visibility for the first time.
The move onto ACPOHE’s own domain, with a 301 strategy, protects the search visibility built up over the years.
The committee can edit content, add courses and manage members themselves, without needing a developer for routine changes.