Aromacoach Academy

The aromacoach academy was a fresh project without existing assets at the time we started. Therefore, our first step was to line out the architecture together with the academy, clarifying the backend base, important aspects, and design principle.

 

The goal was to create an intuitive learning platform that provides an easy to use frontend for course takers and a full learning management system as the backend for the course creator. The main offering of the academy should be an online course that is booked directly through the page, so the profile creation and payment process should be included in the page. A few additional pages around the learning platform were needed to provide explanatory information regarding the company and the course itself as well as legal pages and contact information.

After our initial meeting with the owner of the academy, we knew the basic framework that we needed to work in. Also, we clarified the brand name and color scheme to proceed with.

 

The following aspects became our orientation guide to decide the tech stack we would go with:

• The content of the pages and course should be easily adjustable through an intuitive backend
• We needed to provide a secure login functionality with adjustable user profiles
• The system should include a basic storefront with multiple payment options
• Since the company is located in Germany, it was important to take care of GDPR as well
• Courses needed to include multiple lessons with video and text material as well as automatically graded tests that would unlock the access to the next lesson

 

Wordpress as our go-to CMS

From the above criteria, together with the time and budget allocated, we decided that going with a Wordpress-based solution would be the best option in this case. Wordpress provides a robust framework in PHP that can easily take care of secure user profiles and database management. It is open source and very extendable through a variety of add-ons. We included a page builder to create a backend that offers the possibility to edit the page's content without writing a single line of code.

 

Tutor LMS with custom add-ons for the course creation

Building up on Wordpress, we included Tutor LMS, a full lerning management system that can take care of courses, enrolment, tests, and gradings. Through the open-source nature of Wordpress, we could add customized functionality to the learning platform by writing our own add-ons. That is great because it saves us a lot of time and effort to build the systematics behind the entire application but we still can make it super customized to our special use case by writing our custom PHP add-ons that essentially extend the existing functionality without breaking it.

 

Adding Woocommerce for payments

Now that we had the pages and courses in place, it was time to take care of the shop functionality. We needed to create an option for clients to buy the course through a secure payment gateway while keeping everything in line with the GDPR. Woocommerce is a great option to do that when using Wordpress, so we implemented a Woocommerce storefront and connected it to Paypal for an easy checkout. Woocommerce has an EU-Plugin to make the store aligned with European law.

 

Handover and training

After our setup work was done, we sat down again with the owner of the academy to explain the technical concepts behind and to give an in-depth training on how to use the platform, how to edit website contents and how to create and manage the course. Of course, we stand by for questions and adjustments afterwards.

The result is a well-working platform that provides the course, manages tests and payments, and is easy to use for both the backend side and the frontend side.

 

As with all projects, we made sure to provide a scalable option. That means, that in a later step, there can be more courses added without needing to adjust the system or develop new things again. So, the platform can grow together with the academy with no effort.

 

This project is hosted on our servers and we have an eye on regular maintenance and integrity.