I have to admit that when I first met with TK Stanford and Joseph Phillips in that Chick Fil A on Lawrenceville Suwanee Road, that building a membership site for soccer coaching wasn’t going to work.
But as I met with TK more over the next few months, I learned a lot more about his passion for soccer and people.
He has such a love for the game of soccer, that he can’t imagine doing anything else but create a platform which will allow him to teach soccer players of all ages so that they can create magic moments in their games.
What we’ve built at TheSoccerTutor is going to be very successful. It is a perfect example of “Your site isn’t finished because you’ve launched the site.”
Websites are NEVER finished.
Let’s look at this project though.
E-Commerce vs Membership Websites
First of all we created a realistic architecture for a site of this type. Membership sites have a lot of complexities. I’ve helped several clients with E-commerce capabilities, but creating the mechanisms for various membership levels, protecting content from non members and even the variety of levels of memberships, and connecting commerce capability with all of this is completely different from standard E-commerce. Selling a widget that has an exact cost, an exact weight, an exact width and height, is easy. Selling time and online viewable content is more complex.
Responsive Design
We created an attractive design that is responsive. This was a must. We HAD to have a site which would work on any browser and multiple devices. We KNOW that our site members will be accessing the website on tablets and even phones. The website had to be flexible to that.
VideoPress
This is a VERY heavy Video site. That created complexities. We had to investigate whether to self host the videos or use YouTube or Vimeo. We settled with Video Press from WordPress and LOVE it. It is fantastic. It allows us to create some very nice.
Content Ownership
But let me tell you what is going to make this Website more successful than anything I could do.
Content is King. We all know that cliche.
But who owns the content?
When I work with small business owners, I can tell within our first few meetings if their Website will be more successful than others. If I see that they are interested in creating content… in actually getting their hands dirty with writing compelling content.
TK has been all over this. He has enjoyed creating the videos. Writing blog posts. He gets it.
Content isn’t his background, but he has accepted the responsibility to own his Website content. This will make him successful. Especially with a membership Website, there HAS to be consistency in hitting the publish button. In thesoccertutor’s example, I want to see additional video drills and exercises that can help me better my game.
I’m excited to coach TK in something that I am good at, so that he can coach others in something that he is excellent at.
Check out the site. He’s got nearly 50 videos for launch and will be creating 5-10 new videos a month. He’ll be blogging twice a week. I don’t personally play soccer and neither do my kids, but while I’ve been working on this site, I have learned a lot about the game and feel like someone who really has a passion for the game and wants to better themselves, could do so with a membership to TheSoccerTutor.
A Website is NEVER done.
We’re excited about the future. There’s a lot that we’re going to be doing in the next few months. We already have a road map of things that we’re going to be developing. We’ve got our sites on some good social media marketing, email marketing, Pay Per Click Marketing… It’s gonna be fun.
I’m glad that Wingspan Marketing and TheSoccerTutor are partners in this and excited to see them have their own magic moments in small business marketing.
Visit TheSoccerTutor