Kathy from Inner West Community Energy came to us for 4 hours of custom WordPress training.
This was the wishlist she wanted to cover in the training
- Improve her skills in managing the website.
- Add a membership subscription page where people can make membership payments (via PayPal).
- Integrate the website with a database system to keep track of members.
- Create and send newsletters and manage client data.
- Change the look and feel of the site to be more modern.
This was the old site
What we did in the training
Firstly
- The theme needed to be changed.
- As the current theme didn’t have many options available to achieve what we wanted.
- Divi was my theme of choice for its flexibility in design and amazing page builder.
- After we installed it, we configured the main settings including;
- Adding a logo.
- Additionally, we made the logo smaller as the current one was oversized (taking up too much valuable real estate).
- Choosing fonts and colours.
Secondly
- We created a custom home page layout.
- With a full-width slider, that Kathy will add more images to later.
- Then, we created a standard template to use as our default layout for all the other pages.
- The next job was to create a nice blog page.
- Which still needs a little work i.e. images added.
- Then added some more pages including; team members, FAQs and contact page.
Thirdly
- The business needed a “Join Us” page that had the option to signup people for a small fee.
- Therefore we added a simple membership plugin that accepted PayPal.
- Which the members could add their name, details and pay $5 to join.
- Kathy wanted to add Social Media. So we installed a plugin called Monarch (which comes with Divi).
- Then added the URLs for each Social Media profile.
Finally
- One of the main features Kathy wanted, was to collect emails and save them to a database.
- The best and easiest way to do this was with MailChimp.
- Thus, we installed the Bloom plugin, which also comes with Divi.
- We then went to MailChimp and configured it.
- Including adding an Audience and creating an API key.
- Once this was set up we connected it to the site through the Bloom plugin.
- We added a popup box that slides in from the right bottom of the site.
- Making it less intrusive for the user.
To sum up
We did quite a lot in 4 hours! Including a redesign using the Divi theme from Elegant Themes (my favourite theme!). Kathy also learnt how to edit and maintain the site. We covered everything from her wishlist, so she was very pleased!
Click the link if you would like some WordPress training.
View the new site – innerwestcommunityenergy.org.au
Written by Jodi Allbon 2019.
