StartTrading.com – E-Learning Website Development with LearnDash and Memberpress
Technologies and Plugins Involved
- LearnDash
- Elementor
- MemberPress
- Hubspot CRM
- WPEverest User Registration
- Nextend Social Login & Register
Overview of the Situation
Starttrading.com is a trading educational platform for people of all ages and experience levels to learn how to trade in a fun and interactive way.
They wanted to launch an online trading educational course platform and were looking for a developer who would come on and help with the creation of our online course portal.
Before I started working with them, they’ve tried somebody from Fiverr, but things didn’t work out well.
Here is what Mitchell (the owner of the platform wrote):
We hired a developer on Fiverr but the language/ communication barrier has become a roadblock to finishing the project.
So they needed someone experienced to help them finish the project.
Project Goals
The main goals of the project were:
- Implement the provided designs
- Finish the E-Learning part using of the website
- Build the dashboard, course progress and lesson pages based on provided designs
- Make sure that lessons can be indexed by search engines yet they had to be protected from visitors that were not logged in
- Add the ability to login and register using Google and Facebook
- Capture all leads in HubSpot CRM
My Contribution
We started the project with a short 1-hour consultation call to discuss the project goals and deadline.
After the call, I started working on finishing the designs and making sure that LearnDash was configured properly.
Some of the pages had to be designed in Elementor as the website was already using it.
To design other pages, I had to create a child theme and override the LearnDash templates.
Here is how the main pages started to look like:
- Dashboard Page:
- Single Unit Page:
- Single Lesson Page:
There was a lot of redundant code that the old developer has left and it has caused some conflicts so I had to remove it.
After LearnDash was properly configured, I had to rebuild the Login and Registration process.
The default one that LearnDash provides wasn’t going to be enough as we needed customizations like social logins and integration with HubSpot.
For the registration part, I’ve used the User Registration plugin by WPEverest.
I’ve had to build a custom login form because other plugins that I tried didn’t provide enough flexibility for me.
Here is how it looks like right now:
To help us with social login and registration, I’ve used Nextend Social Login and Register plugin.
After that, we needed to make sure that the content was protected from people who are not registered, yet it had to be visible to Google bots.
I’ve decided to use MemberPress for that purpose as it has a good paywall mechanism.
Here is how protected pages look in Google Search:
And when you visit the page (if you’re not registered), this is what you will see:
The website will ask you to log in if you want to view the content.
It’s a similar mechanism that New York Times and Wall Street Journal are using to protect their content.
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