A bespoke online shop for students and teachers

The brief

Peter got in touch to replace his ageing website with something more modern and appealing to his customers. He needed an online shop where he could sell digital teaching resources, books and magazines to students and teachers. It had to be easy to use, while meeting a strict set of functional requirements.

The challenges

The brief itself was fairly straightforward, but the functionality behind it was anything but. Users needed to register as either a student or a teacher, and what they could access depended on which one they were. That meant building a bespoke registration flow into WooCommerce to handle the restrictions.

On top of that, the site needed:

• Multi-accounts - one main account with a number of sub-accounts, all able to access purchased content

• Read-on-screen - so digital books can be read right there in the browser

• Subscriptions - giving access to older, legacy content

What I did

I wireframed, designed and built the website from scratch. It runs on WordPress with a custom theme I built specifically for this project, and WooCommerce for the shop, with all of the bespoke functionality built in. Peter is also on a maintenance plan, so I look after support, updates and general upkeep.

The outcome

The finished website does exactly what Peter needed. The design is clean, modern and easy to use, buying is simple from product page to checkout, and the back end is straightforward for Peter to update himself. Within the first three days of launch, more than 30 people had registered an account.