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Cathy, our first client and the owner of Conder House Laundry & Linen Service, recently approached us with a requirement to offer online training to her Early Learning Centre clients in Canberra. Conder House is an environmentally conscious business that provides residential and commercial linen services.
Cathy had previously paid a freelance service provider to build her business website, and let’s say the delivered product was less than ideal. A freelance developed the original website on Joomla, mobile responsiveness was lacking, and it was clear that a broken theme was in use.
We started with a simple rebuild in WordPress on the first iteration, focusing on improving the website’s SEO and mobile responsiveness. We later added the capability for Cathy to sell her subscription pick up/drop off services online. Finally, we focused on branding the website further on the second pass and refreshed the original copy.
With SEO optimisation and all-new copy, the refreshed website pushed Conder House to the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Deciding To Rebuild
Cathy’s business had considerably matured since we went through our initial iterations. We looked to the website’s future and long-term sustainability with that in mind. Whilst the owner had moved away from subscription management online, there was the new requirement to deliver training to her childcare business customers.
After three iterations, two hosting migrations, and WooComerce installed and uninstalled, the site felt bloated, especially as we started developing the course content. There come’s a point at which you need to rebuild on a clean slate; that time was now for the existing Conder House website.
A few clicks and some hosting magic later, we had a perfectly fresh installation of WordPress setup in our staging environment.
The Rebuild
Our goals with this renewed website build were clear. First, we had to produce a clean, fast, mobile-ready website. The website also had to offer online training to boot. These requirements meant we needed to assess which theme and plugins we would be utilising to meet these requirements.
We decided on Blocksy from Creative Themes; it’s an exceedingly powerful and yet remarkably lightweight theme. In addition, it was the perfect fit for an all-new WordPress Website, especially when users expect pages to load almost instantly.
With picking a theme out of the way, we started investigating how to offer online training for the business owners’ childcare centre customers. We previously settled on Tutor LMS, as it provided robust functionality for building the courses; it also provided an easy to operate front end for the consumer.
Given we had already built a lot of the course content in Tutor LMS using Divi Builder, we ended up deciding to keep this combination. So we installed and utilised the Elegant Themes Divi Builder plugin exclusively for the lesson pages within Tutor LMS. Divi Builder certainly made importing the course content a lot easier.
Our final challenge was related to the video content included in the course. Cathy wanted to prevent the course videos from being downloaded whilst offering accessibility functionality. To meet this requirement, we utilised Presto Player, which offered watermarking, player themes, chaptering, closed caption support and, notably, HLS streaming. While HLS is not bulletproof, it goes a long way to protect the video content from being downloaded.
Going Live
Thanks to our hosting capabilities, the shift from staging into production was utterly painless. One click, and moments later, the new website was live without hassles.
Since going live with the new rebuild, we’ve continued to work with Cathy in refining the content and improving the website’s performance. We’re also pleased to report that over 25 students have completed Cathy’s online course content.