StudySpanish

StudySpanish.com is an e-learning platform launched in 1998. It was pioneer in educational websites. Their main objective is to help people to speak Spanish fluently. They keep helping thousands every year.

Inception phase

Our client came to us with 2 situations, firstly he was stuck in a very old platform without the ability to even make a simple typo update of any page content. Secondly, his business was shifting so quick that make changes to this old platform started to be a headache, at that point he knew that rebuild the site was the only way to keep the audience.

We choose Wordpress with custom type contents and custom plugin. We have integrated a membership system for handling different students levels and also to collect payments via Stripe. By that time, we had years of experience with Wordpress and we had been working on server tuning  for improving Wordpress performance in other projects, so we were confident this would be a good choice (and it does).

Development phase

We started working on the new look and feel for the brand, our designer spend a couple of days checking the current logo and thinking how he build a new design for it. We realized that we should make a full brand renew, our designer has worked on 3 new logos and he has proposed new designs accordingly. After a couple of weeks, we were confirming new logo and website design with the client.

Excited with the new brand identity, we’ve moved forward to develop the new platform. It was a very large phase, months of work, with new ideas and new features enhancing the platform every day. It was a process of several iterations, coding great features and checking back with the client.

We have integrated and customized an existing membership plugin because the requested behavior was quite unique. We have also integrated Stripe as recurring payments gateway and Paypal as “one time” payments alternative.

Part of the older website was implemented using Flash, very old technology that is currently not supported under mobile devices. We have re-build all tools and games under a modern solution, mobile-friendly and fully supported for major devices. We’ve combined  HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to make interactive flashcard games with flipping cards animations and mp3 audio. We implemented jQuery animate and GSAP for smooth animations. Everything has been integrated in the content management system, for an easy and convenient maintenance. The admin user just needs to upload images, mp3 audio and text, our flashcard software does the rest.

One of the key feature is the learning system. It involves teachers, students and classes. We have worked closely with one of the teachers to design and define all assignment management system, assessments, class manager, students options and many other features related to it.

We have developed more than 14 custom Wordpress plugins for this project. All of them under strict QA process and 100% Wordpress standard.

We have completed and launched this project on October 2016. In order to handle a daily audience of 100,000 visitors we have setup a CentOS server, integrated cache system and we have also worked on performance optimization to deliver most of the pages under 2-3 seconds.