I thought you may like to see the application we submitted. Hopefully it may give you some ideas for your won business?

Cheers

Janet

Wonderful Web Women began life in September 2007 using the Memberspeed software. 8 weeks later we won an award for best membership site using that software. The web site really tested Memberspeed functionality and, even though the software was powerful with great functions, the bugs in the software were driving us crazy! After 2 years Wonderful Web Women had grown into an incredible resource. With hundreds of audios, pdf’s, videos and member articles, as well as thousands of members on the database, the membership site had grown into a real community. We really wanted to transfer the site to a more reliable platform but with such a big site the task seemed overwhelming. So we put that in our “one day” basket and soldiered on.

Be careful what you wish for! In January 2010, the hosting provider for Wonderful Web Women disappeared.  One morning, when trying to access the site(s), they were just not there.  The hosting provider was not responding to calls and investigation showed that the physical server did not exist. They had gone belly-up without telling us.

PHOENIX RISING FROM THE ASHES

At first we decided to reinstate the site using the backups we made on a regular basis. These were made using the procedures recommended with the Memberspeed software. Imagine our horror when we discovered none of the physical files (MP3s, pdfs, images, videos etc) were backed up. The back-up procedures recommended were inadequate.

Faced with the massive task of recreating the site from almost scratch, we saw this as an opportunity. We would come back better than before, with a much more reliable and flexible system. Wishlist Member of course! A regular Phoenix rising from the ashes.

Lead by our web developer, Charly Leetham, we pulled together our team of virtual assistants who, between them and us, had every file created over the last 2 years. We consulted with our members on what they would like to have on the new site and we even had members sending us CDs with files they had downloaded over the years.

Wonderful Web Women has an incredibly loyal membership. Many of our members have been with us for over 2 years. It took our team, working around the clock, 4 weeks to recreate the web site and in that time not a single member left us. In fact people emailed us asking how to join. We had to turn them away because there was no web site!

Below are some of the special features we developed especially for the site, ways we have made the most of Wishlist features and some comments on how this has revolutionized the running of our business. We now recommend Wishlist to all our customers and have produced 2 other membership sites created with Wishlist (www.wonderfulwebseminars.com and www.wonderfulwebworld.com ).

MEMBERSHIP LEVELS

There are several membership levels to Wonderful Web Women:

1. Free membership to develop the trust relationship with the member

This membership level provides limited access to content and resources.  The resources provided are very valuable, though naturally the real ‘meat’ of the site is provided to paying members. There is a one time offer for paid membership when a free member first joins. A Free Member is assigned a specific WP Role on registration.

2. Gold Membership

This membership provides access to all content and resources on the site.  There are several ways to pay for Gold Membership: Monthly recurring, Annually and Lifetime. A Gold Member is assigned a specific WP Role on registration.

3. Faculty Members

The faculty are the people that Janet has interviewed as part of the Wonderful Web Women program.  The Faculty members have access to lifetime Gold membership. They are also featured in a special part of the site, which is a profile function of Wishlist / wordpress. A Faculty Member is assigned a specific WP Role on registration.

SPECIAL FEATURES

******Displaying Gold Member Profiles******

Each Gold Member has the ability to display a profile on the Wonderful Web Women website.  A rotating profile is displayed on the home page of the site automatically, and all profiles may be viewed through the Gold Members Profiles page.  This gives members great exposure and back links to their sites.

Members are able to upload their own image, add a profile, a link to their website and links to their social network profiles.  Each gold member may nominate whether their profile is displayed on the site.

If information is missing from the profile, it will not be displayed on the site which means the profile appears complete and professional for all members.

******Displaying Faculty Member Profiles********

Faculty Member profiles are updated by Janets’ VA’s and displayed automatically on the site.  The same information is provided for Faculty Members as it is for Gold Members except they are in a different, featured part of the site.

The Faculty Member display checks whether there is a profile description for the member and, if it is missing, the profile will not display.  If the profile description exists, the Faculty Member profile will display as standard. Affiliate links to the faculty member’s offers are displayed which provides another stream of income.

For both profile pages, the profiles are displayed in a random order and also randomly featured on the home page.

********Member Dashboards********

The Wonderful Web Women site uses different dashboards for the Free and Gold Members.

These pages are more like ‘portals’ to the other parts of the site.

This site has a lot of information and rather than overwhelming members with everything at once, the dashboard pages have been created to guide members to the sections they are looking for.

********Modules Page********

Another way to help members access the wealth of resources without suffering overwhelm was to create a “modules” page. This has the topic area and then icons in a table for audio, video, checklists etc. To keep update simple, new resources are created as posts with tags that relate to the module category (eg: websitebasics/audios). This means all latest resources are available by clicking on the link and the resources that display will always be up to date.

********Navigation********

Different navigation menus have been created based on the logged in and membership level.

We have created a navigation menu for the top of the site and the right hand column (sidebar).

One challenge we experienced in developing this site was the fact that the menu’s for all levels were displayed to the admin users.  This created confusion for the various admin users and to remedy this, a series of functions to determine the ROLE of the logged in user.  These functions are called using the Wishlist Widget Logic plugin to determine which Menu to display.  This ensures that admin users see specific menus and not all menus.

********Home Page********

The Home Page is created from content on the site.

The different sections on the homepage are taken from Categories or Tags, this makes it easy for the site administrators to change the content on the homepage. It also means there is rotating content on the site to highlight different members and content.

********Forum********

Simple Press Forum has been implemented to increase the community interaction.

A number of sub forums exist and access to those forums are based on the WP Role of the member.

One challenge noted was the upgrade from Free to Paid members.  On membership upgrade using Wishlist Member, the WordPress Role is not changed.  This created an issue where paid members were not able to access areas on the Forum.  A script was developed that checked the members roles on login and added or removed roles according to the active WLM level(s).

HOW WISHLIST HAS REVOLUTIONISED OUR BUSINESS

Using Wishlist has saved us thousands of dollars in staff / contractor costs. Trouble shooting is now at a minimum because the software is so reliable.

We have integrated Wishlist with 1 Shopping Cart which means we can really run everything in the business from 2 places:

1.       WordPress admin (we don’t have to log into WishList a lot once it is set up, so we really only have to add content and occasional member changes).

2.       Admin area of 1 Shopping Cart.

This has allowed me to create a new suite of procedure checklists for our virtual team that let them take over responsibilities that before had too many steps involved.

The consequence? A reduction in staffing costs and a business that is so systemized now, that 2 months after rebuilding Wonderful Web Women the owners were able to spend close to a month in Thailand, with no computer and no contact with our virtual team. And returned to money in the bank and happy customers. Bliss!

REASON FOR THE NOMINATION

Wonderful Web Women was completely rebuilt using WordPress and Wishlist Member in 4 weeks.  This included the development of a specialised theme, graphic design and specialised coding for the Profile and Home pages, navigation menus and Change WLM Roles functionality.  It also included uploading all the content and creating pages and posts for the display of information.

The site has been designed to deliver content to the Wonderful Web Women community in an easy to find fashion, whilst providing an ease of management to the site administrators.

This is a membership site that has become the hub of a genuine online community, has weathered the test of time and will be here for years to come.

Who wins is determined by vote so I’d really appreciate if you can take 30 seconds to vote over here:

I’ve shot this short video below to share with you:

• What the Wishies are
• Why this is so significant
• What software combination we use to create our membership sites
• How transferring our business to this combo has saved us thousands of dollars already
• How this combo let me travel for close to a month in Thailand with no computer.

I’d love to hear your comments. Just leave them below.

And thankyou so much for taking the time to vote and even more for being part of this great community.

Here’s the link to vote again. It should only take about 30 seconds.

Can you also take the time to vote here for Charly Leetham, the web site wiz who created our sites? She is a finalist for being a great techy and she so deserves to win.

Cheers

Janet

P.S. I’d love to hear your comments and questions below. Go on…..join the conversation

P.P.S. Would you like to see our application we sent in that got us to the top 5? I’ve posted it here for you. This may give you some ideas for entering awards yourself and also give you ideas for your business.

One of the members of The Our Internet Faculty that I am fortunate to mastermind with, is professional blogger Yaro Starak. I really admire Yaro because he is very genuine and incredibly successful without blowing his own trumpet too loudly.

This week I downloaded his free report on setting up a low cost membership site and it is absolutely brilliant.

It is no cost (apart from your email address) though it should be

You can get it here.

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