Introduction
This client offers information and guidance to a wide range of stakeholders involved in international trade, through online resources as well as regular regional and national meetings.
Their challenges with the current website at the time was that it was dated, difficult to edit and wasn’t taking care of repetitive duties that were having to be done manually.
The main goals for the project were to completely rebuild the website with modern technology, to ensure it was a robust and flexible system that could adapt to their business needs. It was therefore clear that WordPress was going to be the perfect solution for the client.
Project Scope
The website needed to have ecommerce membership functionality so that users could register and pay for their membership online. All memberships needed to expire on a specific date, so there needed to be logic to handle pro-rata membership costs and hard set expiry dates.
Valid members needed to be able to log in to the site to access restricted content and forums, plus get a number of free tickets to attend planned events. Tickets for events also needed to be purchasable by non members too.
Development and Technology
There were three key pieces to this puzzle and they all needed to talk to each other in some way.
Ecommerce: We opted for WooCommerce to handle the ecommerce functionality as it’s a very robust platform and it has a ton of useful add-ons.
Membership & content restriction: We chose Restrict Content Pro to lock down specific content to members only and offer membership functionality.
Bookable events: We went with Events Tickets Plus to provide the bookable tickets logic as it allowed us to provide free tickets to members and purchasable tickets to non members.
All three of these plugins integrated seamlessly and handled the core functionality required for the new website.We also used BB Press for the forums as it’s a battle-tested system which is fairly easy to customise the look of.
Not to mention all of the usual plugins we also include in our websites to harden security, improve performance and provide enhanced SEO features.
Results and Outcomes
The project definitely had its challenges and threw some difficult problems at us, but the end result was fantastic and the client couldn’t be happier.
The new website has saved the client countless admin hours as it’s now performing routine tasks for them and handling payments automatically.
The website traffic grew 162% in the first year and they had a 34% increase in membership renewals compared to when they were handling them manually. This was a huge win for them financially.
“The new website is doing things we never thought possible and it has cemented our place as the leading experts in the industry.”
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