GXD Academy is a startup founded in 2021 with the aim of providing completely remote and flexible learning in the highest-paid industries, with courses taught by experienced professionals, rather than lecturers in the sector.
This company wanted to build its brand from scratch, together with artwork for both print and social media applications, and a website where the prospective students could book the courses they want to attend.
In order to avoid PCI compliance issues, I suggested they implement Stripe and PayPal as payment methods, and use their hosted pages as the checkout. Both payment processors also have stock counting and price control as part of their services, which further reduces costs for the start-up.
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A New Brand: Creation of logo, brief brand guide and direction of the brand.
Social Media Pages and a Digital Marketing Plan: A digital marketing plan which included Facebook and LinkedIn as the main social media pages, artworks in all sizes for the social pages (such as profile pictures and rotating banners), posts and adverts including Google Display.
Videos: The client also required videos for advertising on YouTube, Google Display channels and social media channels.
Website: A newly designed website built on CMS which provides the client a high degree of flexibility in terms of updating and adding new content.
Research showed that the majority of academic companies, the main colours are based on dark and/or cold palettes. While these colours tend to denote a certain level of prestige and value, they are rarely associated with youth, fun, a fresh outlook, or the contemporary. The most common style is also quite geometric and minimalistic, with certain entities opting for a more complex and detailed style with more of a traditional twist.
Given these insights, I tested with the other end of the spectrum, using warm and bright colours and organic shapes, with a mix of minimal layouts and decorated backgrounds. The whole design idea was built while keeping in mind target audience. The client was very happy with the results, and required a very brief brand book which just covers the basics of the brand, such as logo sizes, typography and colours.
I used Webflow to build the website - it is quite an intuitive CMS and slowly becoming popular. As a payment processor, I integrated Stripe for card payments, due to their free merchandising back office (where the merchant can update pricing, stock amounts, etc) and also their lower percentage rate off each transaction. I also pushed the integration of PayPal - even though its rate is much higher and the user friendliness on the merchant side much lower than Stripe, many users still seek it when paying online, confident in the safety it boasts that it provides.
The resulting website proved very simple and easy to navigate, with eye-catching CTAs and all the information that the prospective student might need to know. I also provided a Start From Here button, which takes the user directly to the list of courses available. The website is divided into 5 main sections:
I integrated the Live Chat plug-in by Facebook, so that the client receives any incoming messages directly on her phone by installing the Meta Business app. For cookies implementation (to be GDPR compliant) I used the very effective free tool named Finsweet, which made it so much easier for me.
To make the merchant's daily operational workflow easier, I used Zapier and created multiple automations (automated chains of actions) such as:
The final step to this project was submitting the website sitemap to Google, integrating Google Analytics and Google Search console to start collecting audience and interaction data straight away, while keeping tabs on website health in terms of responsiveness and accessibility. Adding the business to Google Business was also important for future customers to see opening times and other information about the new start-up.
I think that this was the most intensive and satisfying project that I have worked on. I discovered new tools, automation processes and information that I never knew existed, but which are so vital for online businesses to kick off their dream sustainably with limited capital.
GXD Academy went Live on November 2021. The domain and brand were bought by another online learning company.
