Project Description
Jigsaw Early Years Consultancy asked Picture Engine to take over the management of their websites from the original designer Nicki at The Branding Boutique, who had the enviable problem of too much work! As part of this project, Picture Engine was asked to set up Jigsaw’s new membership site Adding IMPACT. The wrinkle was that this site had already been part-launched, and memberships had sold out, but the membership content needed to be added and configured in a user-friendly way on a tight (and immovable!) deadline. Nicki and Jigsaw had already set up some of the imagery and branding, so Picture Engine’s role was to ensure a seamless brand transition and a smooth, on-time launch of the exclusive member content.
Andrew created a members site that was easy to use and did this with a week to go before launch. His service is excellent and I could not recommend him enough. He saved the day for us and now have him maintaining both our sites to ensure it flows with any updates it needs. Thanks to Andrew we have a faster website which enables the user to have a great journey.
Vanessa Dooley, Jigsaw Early Years Consultancy - Adding Impact Members ClubWebsite Redesign
The main priority with this website was to ensure that the customer’s journey from first finding the page to reading about the membership, signing up and then working through the membership content was smooth and intuitive – the “UX”, or User Experience in web jargon, was crucial. We therefore took another good look at how each page flowed to the next and made sure that there were clear and obvious links from one to the next, and clear explanations of what it was all about.
LMS and Membership
The content is a set of 6 monthly masterclasses, one released each month from August to January. It was important to Jigsaw that customers could track their own journey through the masterclasses, and that no-one could share content with any non-members, so we used a combination of WordPress plugins to achieve this. A Learning Management System (LMS) called Learndash manages the member journey through each masterclass and lets them track their progress, while a membership plugin called Memberpress limits access to the LMS pages to paid-up members and controls the monthly release of content so that no administrator interaction is required – new content simply becomes available automatically each month.
Each month there were live Facebook events for members, so we added countdown timer widgets for all the live events to each Masterclass page to make sure members knew when they were taking place!
Hosting
During the process of working on both of Jigsaw’s websites, it became clear that the existing hosting at 123-Reg was causing problems; both sites had outgrown the host in terms of number of users, memory limit, PHP limits and ease of use. Picture Engine therefore researched alternative providers and recommended transferring both sites and their respective domains to WordPress hosting specialist Siteground. We would normally recommend our hosting partner Ionos, but in this case the issues experienced by the site would benefit from the optimisation tools built into Siteground’s hosting service (CDN caching, image optimisation etc). Picture Engine managed the transition to minimise the downtime and the impact on the business and its customers and were happy to note a significant improvement in site performance and speed.
