Last time, I admitted I once forgot the importance of basing tech-focused courses on a relatable ‘case study’ story.
So it should come as no surprise to learn that the choice of case study story for my new Webflow course has been on my mind since the earliest days of planning.
First, my idea was to base the course on migrating a real (actually real, not ‘made-up’ real) WordPress+Elementor website. Nothing more realistic and relatable than actually real, right?
A few weeks ago, I invited some students who took my previous one-off live Webflow training series to submit their own WP sites for consideration, to be rebuilt by me in Webflow.
I had a load of submissions (thanks guys) and I even chose one (thanks John M).
However, I later got cold feet about this approach.
The thing is, in the past I’ve either purpose-designed tutorial material myself, or I’ve used licensed templates that allow anyone to use them in their own projects as they wish.
So if students decide to copy them for their own projects, it’s happy days all round, no worries. Whereas if people are copying someone’s actual business website (with the best of intentions, but still…) it could get messy.
I couldn’t shake the niggling worry.
And then I remembered…
We already have an unfinished story waiting to be continued!
It’s the story of a LA-based health and wellness studio, run by Jane Kali.
Jane and her team teach yoga, pilates, meditation and a range of other complementary, alternative therapies.
The business is going from strength-to-strength, despite the disruption of a global pandemic which has forced Jane to adapt how she delivers her services.
We first built a website for Jane using WordPress and Elementor 18 months or so ago. It was a serious improvement on the DIY effort they’d previously thrown together themselves.
Jane Kali’s alternative health and wellness centre is called No Stress Studio.
And yes—this was the pretend case study client that my course No Stress WordPress 2.0 was based on.
What better starting off point for the story of the new Webflow course?!
Quite a lot of stuff has happened since we launched version one of Jane’s site.
“Like what?” you ask.
Well, since we last saw her, Jane has developed a liking for Scandinavian crime dramas. She’s since spent more than a few evenings binge-watching classics of the genre on Netflix, like The Bridge, Wallander and The Killing.
Ooops, sorry… you mean stuff regarding Jane’s website?
Ah, gotcha.
Ok, here’s the story:
Since we built and launched v1 of the site, we’ve worked with Jane on a monthly retainer, delivering real value and real ROI for her business:
Updating the design and copy for conversion…
Creating and testing new landing pages…
Advising on SEO measures to attract local traffic…
Plus generally keeping on top of new trends and technologies to improve her business and her bottom line.
However, another aspect of our monthly retainer has delivered no value whatsoever:
Updating WordPress plugins…
Fixing problems caused by those updates…
Battling security issues…
And other pointless, irritating and time-consuming maintenance and fixes.
And this aspect of our ongoing work has led to zero (or even negative) ROI for our client.
We feel bad about this, partly cos we’re charging Jane every month to update and fix the very solution WE recommended as the most suitable for her needs in the first place.
Further, Jane doesn’t especially like the WP interface. It’s unnecessarily complicated and unintuitive, even though we’ve done our best to hide stuff she shouldn’t see and make the dashboard as pleasant an experience as we can, with the help of a couple of extra plugins.
So… Jane has bitten the bullet and accepted our recommendation to migrate the site to Webflow, which we’ve argued is the best solution for her business’ needs today.
She’s delighted (as are we!) that there will be no plugins to update, no separate systems to clash and break things, no security issues to worry about.
The whole site will be far easier for us to maintain and develop in future, because Webflow offers true, easy global styling of absolutely everything.
Plus, she’ll have a beautifully simple content editing interface that will make it easy for her and her team to update and manage the site, with no additional work required on our part to make that happen.
And while we’re at it, we’re going to take the opportunity to improve the design and implement some new content sections and features too.
It’s all very exciting.
Ooh, I almost forgot… one more thing.
Jane has also decided to take this opportunity to undertake a bit of a rebrand, including a change of business name.
She feels that ‘No Stress Studio’ has served her well up till now. But she’s had her mind set on a new name for some time… and it’s a name that’s oddly appropriate, considering the move to the new website platform.
Can you guess the new name?
Ok…
Tomorrow I’ll be back to share with you some of the planning process for the new case study site as well as some screenshots of the work in progress. It’s been fun.