Last year, one of CEDIA’s big investments was building a consumer-facing website to help drive business to its integrator members through strong SEO and consumer technology education. This week, the trade association re-launched its other CEDIA.net website to better support the trade (primarily CEDIA members) with improved online training resources, research, and business tools.
Jamie Riley, CEDIA’s senior director of public relations and marketing, took me on a virtual tour through the new site yesterday and it was clear that trade association’s staff has been hard at work the last two years developing this new industry resource. According to Riley, members asked for online learning, accessible training, better tools and templates, research reports, and more member value. CEDIA listened and has now delivered with this new website. It’s very impressive.
CEDIA’s redesigned home page for it’s member and trade-centric website.
Industry members now have 24/7 access to the more resources than ever and each employee in a member company can have a unique login for the first time. It was a major undertaking for CEDIA to bring all of its training resources under one online umbrella and, as far as I could tell, the site has been designed to help members find what they’re looking for with a minimum number of clicks. And the education and training tools that CEDIA has been so good at offering, are now readily available.
“What you’re looking at right here is a complete listing of all CEDIA online-delivered courses and their CEU values,” Riley told me as she clicked through an extensive list of offerings within the training portal on the site. “You no longer need to wait for us to host an event or to release a catalog for a specific curriculum that CEDIA has to offer. It will be here at all times.”
The content is tagged on the backend to allow you to search for a course by topic or category. With that training portal, in-person training registration will also be available to a logged-in user.
CEDIA’s re-imagined training page.
One of the coolest features of the re-launched CEDIA.net site is the “My CEDIA” section, which offers a personal digital archive of all of your CEDIA activities, training, and purchases. Every time you log in to the website you will have access to the “My CEDIA” section, which includes the following areas to help you have the ultimate CEDIA experience:
My Profile – Update your individual profile including your topics of interest and payment methods.
My Training – Keep track of all of your completed and in-progress courses. You can also submit for CEUs just by completing the online form!
My Events – Not sure which CEDIA event you are attending? No worries, the My Event section keeps track of all face-to-face trainings and events you are attending so that you don’t have to.
My Benefits – Get instant access to your exclusive CEDIA benefit discounts all in one place.
My Committees – Want to know who is on your committee or want to review your volunteer history? Look no further, your complete volunteer activity is now housed in your profile and you have instant access to it in the My Committees section.
My Downloads – Gone are the days of saving CEDIA whitepapers to your desktop. You can store them in the “My Downloads” section of the site for easy and instant accessibility for 90 days.
My Order History – You can view your CEDIA transactional history online, including past orders or current saved carts in the “View Cart” section under My CEDIA (only applicable to purchases made after 12.16.13.)
Within the Resources area of the site, you are able to search by specific products. Whether you are searching for a whitepaper to supplement on-the-job training or in need of specific courseware, it’s all available 24/7, and most is free to CEDIA members. The following products are available in the Resources section:
Templates – 100-plus tools and templates to help with business and technical efficiencies.
Whitepapers – 20-plus technical whitepapers covering HDMI, Wireless Audio, and more.
Research Reports – Eight reports including Benchmarking and Size and Scope of the Residential Market.
Guides and Publications – 50-plus CEDIA Training course guides and more.
If it will be your first time checking out the new site follow the log in instructions below:
1. Select Login/Sign Up in the top right corner of the home page.
2. Enter your CEDIA username. (If you don’t have one, create a new account)
3. Enter this password: Cedia123 (All passwords have been reset to this default password for security reasons.) The first time you log-in to cedia.net you will be prompted to change your password.
If you are the main administrator for your company’s membership, after logging in you may begin adding employees. And once an employee is added, he or she can go into their My Profile page (mentioned above) and sign up for the types of communication that they would like to start receiving from CEDIA.
“They can let us know what they’d like to be informed about by clicking on ‘topics of interest’ boxes,” Riley said. “We will really be able to engage with individual members based on what their interests are as we become more aware of their use of products and what they’ve self-identified with.”
