The Brief: Building a Seamless and Secure Online Learning Community for Over 20,000 Members
At The Bench needed a brand new full-featured and powerful membership solution that would allow them to stream secure video content to its members.
They wanted to build an online learning community that sparked creativity and supported and nurtured fellow creatives.
It was also imperative to import 20,000 PayPal and Stripe recurring subscriptions, so members retained all their user data and memberships continued to be active.
The Approach
We discussed the project at some length with Andrew the owner and his team until we had a clear understanding about the look and feel they were after, the immediate functionality required and the scope for growth.
We produced mock-ups that illustrated the appearance of the site, along with its architecture and functionality, and then continued to work closely with Andrew to create the membership site he had envisaged.
Built for speed on WordPress
The site is built on the WordPress platform so the content management system is stable, feature rich and easy to use. WordPress is also SEO friendly making it ideal for Google indexing.
A streamlined WordPress theme and custom plugins, as well as carefully selected free modules to enhance functionality, ensure the site performs and delivers speed not only for usability but search engine ranking as well.
Membership
The fully automated membership system allows free and paid access to content. Membership levels and downloadable materials are easily purchased through credit card and PayPal payment gateways.
The project area allows members to create, categorize and manage individual jewellery projects. They can also collect video tutorials and assign them to projects for reference or add them as favourites.
Secure Videos
The training videos are hosted on Amazon S3 servers and delivered to users at high speeds from any part of the world. The custom HTML5 video player is configured to securely play MP4 videos and links are set to expire to ensure content cannot be shared with unauthorized users.
Feedback
At The Bench prides itself on being a friendly learning community so communication between the team and users is encouraged. Members can use the feedback function to send notes, photos and videos of their projects.
The feedback notification system ensures that team and members are notified by email of all messages. Notifications are also clearly highlighted in the project dashboard area.
Image Galleries
All members have a private image gallery to organize their images for personal reference, to display in the public member gallery or to attach to feedback requests.
