Fabulous new product – The Date Night Project – and of course, a gorgeous new website! In a nutshell, The Date Night Project is a unique program for couples who are serious about creating more connection, fun and spark in their life!
I’ve been working with owner and founder, Bridget, for the last few months on the website for the project which has been challenging and very rewarding! The site had to be easy to use, with a simple sign up process and a straightforward member management process. Sounds easy on the surface, but as with all websites, they present their particular challenges! A very involved and engaged client helped enormously!
At the site’s core, there are two landing sales pages – one for the free eBook and video series with video (via YouTube) being “dripped” each week to people who’ve signed up, and another for the paid membership for the Project with video, downloadable date night plans, plus bonus materials being “dripped” to members each week for 12 months. A solid member management base allowing for “back end” member management; and the ability to drip and manage content was vital.
After much research, Digital Access Pass (DAP) was selected, and well worth the money! After some trial and error, we used the DAP recommended Amazon S3 for video storage and protection, and Media Vault – an extension to DAP for the video player on protected member pages. Whilst pretty much every member site plugin for WordPress promises that you’ll be up and running within hours, and this may be the case if you have one product, with one price, and one signup process, our experience was that it is rather more complex and as with all websites, good planning is paramount! That said, DAP was easy to set up and works like a charm! The customisation I wanted to do was more the challenge, but now that the process is sorted, should be very straightforward to add on to the site as needed.
In terms of design, the site had to be clean, simple, inviting and engaging. Although the target market is most likely going to be women the site couldn’t be too girly.
That the site was responsive was important too, but the focus was on the landing pages first, with secondary focus on responsiveness once you were logged in – video and pdf’s that all had to be protected and still viewable on any number of devices made this a challenge! Some alternative pages were set up for smaller devices, eg iPhones; and because the site is responsive, it functions exactly as expected on larger devices, eg iPads.
Work on the site included the “easy” bits:
- WordPress install, theme selection, and subsequent customisation
- Design of landing pages
- A variety of banners and images for both the website and the Project Facebook page
- Business card design (not quite done!)
- Install and customise a full suite of plugins for both functionality and monitoring
- Search optimisation – this will be challenging only because the bulk of the site is protected, so there are really only a few pages that can be indexed and optimised
- Training and support
And then there was the more complex bits!
- Installation of Digital Access Pass (DAP)
- Setting up the framework for member pages and structure – ultimately there will be 80+ pages in the first 12 months, possibly more so this needed to be thought through very carefully!
- Video production which needed a solid process for transfer of video from .wmv to .mp4 with appropriate encoding (we used Handbrake) for upload to Amazon s3 and subsequent inclusion in member protected pages!
- Paypal integration
- And of course, testing and QA in all manner of ways.
If you’d like more information about any aspect of the site, get in touch!
Released: 26 May 2013
Visit the site: thedatenightproject.com.au
I’ve added a couple of screenshots here – they are long, so it would be well worth your while to head on over to the site and take a look (and could sign up to to see it in action!).
The Date Night Project
Free eBook and Video Series screenshot
The Date Night Project
Paid Product Landing Page screenshot
