RowlandSME GPS Portal | Website Build
RowlandSME GPS Portal | Website Build
The Brief:
In August 2021, we were approached by RowlandSME to rebuild their ‘GPS’ Portal membership website as their previous site was losing support on the system it was built with.
RowlandSME provides a network of professionals that can offer you advice and experience to help your SME.
Their current GPS Portal system provided a pool of resources from a variety of business sectors, experts who provided that content and services such as webinar hosting to its users. To access these resources users are required to sign up to a membership subscription and depending on the membership will determine what resources are available.
After scoping out the original system and speaking with the client we came up with a list of requirements:
- Keep the layout, design and structure of the previous system where possible.
- Must have 3 key pages of Services, Experts, and a library of resources.
- Functionality to support users signing up to memberships.
- Processing payments for those memberships with a secure payment gateway.
- Restrict access to content based on a user’s membership level.
- The backend of the site must allow for our client to easily add new Services, Experts and Resources.
Grant, Jason and Dan did a fabulous job recreating our GPS Portal & Resource Hub in less than 4 weeks after our previous Web developer let us down. Cheers guys!
The Approach:
As this was a rebuild, designers were not required to draw up how the site should look and feel, so we went straight to the developers. Firstly we planned out how to structure the system and how we could implement a membership system within a WordPress website.
After some research we went forward with using MemberPress, a popular WordPress plugin that supported the requirements listed above, i.e. memberships, payments and protected content.
Working through a few iterations of development, we were able to test and show our client the rebuild of their GPS Portal.
After a really positive review call with the client, we moved onto the final stages where we implemented some small copy tweaks, updates to the checkout flow and finally began preparing for launch.
Following the completion of the project, we provided our client with a series of training videos, detailing how to use their new website which will be useful for years to come when adding new content.
You can view the portal here
We are really looking forward to keeping in touch with RowlandSME and wish them all the best with their future endeavours.
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