An online academy for maintenance engineers, with its own community

The brief

The client teaches maintenance and reliability engineering. He wanted a professional academy on a subdomain of his main site, one course for a paid pilot programme at first, at least four courses later, and a path to a mobile app for students. He was open to BuddyBoss for the community side.

How we built it

We started with wireframes so layout decisions were made before code, then built on staging because the live host's caching made iterative work slow. Changes moved to the live site only once he had approved them.

• Custom module and lesson templates with their own fields, so every lesson looks consistent and he can add content without touching layout.
• A discussion forum attached to each lesson, so questions sit next to the material they are about.
• Member profiles showing location, job title and company, a directory filtered by group, and a member map.
• Courses sold through WooCommerce and Stripe, including access for different durations, which LearnDash does not support out of the box. We built the access logic ourselves.
• Downloadable resources that show the right icon for each file type automatically.
• Branded certificates with his signature and a unique certificate number, plus welcome and completion emails.
• AffiliateWP for referrals, WP Fusion for his email platform, an events calendar for live office hours and a coming-soon mode for courses in preparation.

Results

• A launch-ready academy for the pilot programme in about five weeks.
• A structure built for more courses without reworking the templates.
• A community that keeps students talking to each other inside the course.

Client name and site withheld at our discretion. Details are taken from the project record.