Project: USTradingCoach.com

Introduction

This was an end-to-end site development project.  But, it involved very little customization and was built with off-the-shelf plugins and the DIVI 3.0 theme.  The customization that was done included a little CSS, choosing some images and setting options in the theme.  Overall it was a relatively smooth experience.

Scope of Work:

• Modern Responsive Design
• Store with both e-products, memberships and recurring subscriptions
• Support for Stripe and Paypal
• Integration with MailChimp

The Final Product

The DIVI 3.0 theme was a pleasure to work with.  It included very very flexible options for layouts and handling different form factors.  And, it came with a ton of “widgets” out of the box.  We supplemented it with a few DIVI specific add-ons but overall got 95% of what we needed inside the theme itself which is just unheard of.  While it had its share of bugs those were mostly just annoying items, not things that would break a site or project. We will definitely be using this theme for all future projects (until something better comes along!)

WooCommerce was chosen as the store plugin.  We added a few add-ons for membership, subscriptions, coupons etc.

Mailchimp For WordPress was chosen as the plugin to integrate with Mailchimp.  We’ve used this many times before and it is by far the most flexible Mailchimp plugin for WordPress.  Our biggest issue with it is that it doesn’t ship with pre-configured forms – you have to build everything yourself.

Overall, there weren’t a lot of issues with this project.  In fact, we were surprised by how rapidly it all came together.  The hardest part was the graphics and trying to make the store look decent.  For some reason most themes, including DIVI, just seem to fall short on styling stores even though WC is by far the most popular store plugin out there.

Costs

The costs for plugin licenses was less than $700.  Development and integration time was about 2 weeks.  The initial content writing and articles took up the most time. The overall cost came in around $10,000.00 including the cost of hosting for the first year, writers and graphics.

This cost is probably the lowest you can pay for a QUALITY website with these features.  A lot of the the savings was achieved by forgoing the temptation to make changes to the default workflows of the plugins that were used.  Writing custom code for plugins can easily double, even triple the cost of a site.  So using what was already there and adapting to the plugins’ workflows made a huge difference in keeping costs in check.

Wrap Up

We’re quite pleased with the way this turned out.  It was done in an accelerated time frame and using off-the-shelf plugins with little customization.  Most of the time was spent on writing content and deciding on graphics.

Let us know what you think!

You can check out the site here: www.ustradingcoach.com