How YeahDave.com rebranded and relaunched in 30 days with Make Plus

Martyn Bromley is a developer we’ve spent some time getting to know via the Slack channel that we’ve set up for our Make Plus Developer subscribers. He consistently blows us away by how he pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with Make & Make Plus. When he shared the new site he put together for best-selling author, Dave Romanelli, we knew wanted to hear about his workflow for an #iusemake blog post.

From the Herosite website:

“We work one on one with focused entrepreneurs to help develop their online business, powerful websites, digital products, creative branding and marketing.

We remove the technical barriers you normally face while building an online business, so you can stop wasting valuable time trying to be your own IT department and start injecting more fuel into your venture.”

(Herosite.co is a Make-based site also!)

Tell us a little bit about your business and your client…

I’ve been working with WordPress for 8 years and used to run the usual client based WebDev shop, pitch/build/handover repeat, building sites using various themes and plugins. Less than a year ago I redefined my business and have been trying a new approach based on “teach a man to fish,” so much of my work has shifted over to consultancy for people who sort of know what they should be doing with their online business, but need some help getting the most out of the tools available to them. I now promote my consultancy as “A personal trainer for your online businesses”.

My client, best selling author Dave Romanelli (aka.Yeah Dave!) had a somewhat “vintage” bespoke website that housed his online courses and blog which was not at all mobile friendly. He was looking to move over to WordPress and relaunch the site to increase membership signups for his series of happiness and wellbeing courses. Make provided the perfect clean and stylish design he was looking for, and The Theme Foundry’s excellent sister product, Memberful supplied the integration tools needed to provide members with access to his courses and link both Mailchimp autoresponders and payment integration all in one.

Why did you pick Make & Make Plus for the website? Were you looking for specific features?

I chose Make as my “Forever Theme” back when I decided to focus my business on WordPress consultancy and training as it enables me to coach my clients using a consistent page builder. When every site has a different theme with various settings it makes teaching very difficult. And most importantly, the fantastic layout results my clients can achieve very early in the process (without relying on hundreds of shortcodes) means they see much quicker results from their efforts. Using Make as the foundation for all my client sites and training courses means I’ve chosen slimplicity over a million different features that never get used and clients work better with some constraints, they learn quicker and feel more in control of their sites once we’ve finished their training.

How long did it take you to put a site together? What was the process like?

We planned to to be live in 30 days, although I was being very conservative as moving the entire site content—including 16 audio courses—over to WordPress actually happened in less than 48 hours. I put this down to Make’s page builder and it’s ability to create consistent layouts and duplicate them very quickly.

The core site was 90% complete within a week, which is my usual timescale for a conversion. The second week focused on integration with Memberful and setting up the site with additional functionality for members. Finally, we spent time refining the user onboarding process with Mailchimp, and then soft launched to a small group of existing members who had been successfully transitioned over to the new site. All, as planned, just in time for the launch of Dave’s new ‘Soothing Anxiety’ online course.

Has the new site made an impact on your client’s business?

Prior to the update YeahDave!.com was a relic, a homage to another era of web design and development. With a complete makeover—WordPress, Make, and Memberful have catapulted Dave’s online business into the “here and now” (something he likes to remind people of in his modern meditation courses). His online presence is now more accessible to his growing mobile user base, and followers of his books and blog now have access to his written and audio content on all their devices thanks to Make’s default responsive design. This has helped drive page time and readership up even in the first few weeks of going live. Combined with a social media strategy to drive signups for new and existing courses, the business is on track to grow like never before.

You can follow Martyn and Herosite.co on Twitter and take a look at the case study over at Herosite which details the full process of creating a membership site using WordPress, Make and Memberful.

And be sure to check out Dave’s Twitter stream also, @yeahdave.

If you’re using Make & Make Plus as the foundation for your site, we’d love to hear about it! Reach out on twitter using the hashtag #iusemake to grab our attention!