Case Study: English in 30 Minutes

We recently helped a client in the UK launch English in 30 Minutes, a new online learning program that helps students and young professionals improve their English skills. The site had been in development for a year before Uncanny Owl became involved, with work performed by both site owners and 2 other developers. When we took over, functionality was lacking and there were multiples issues with both design and operation. Uncanny Owl’s mandate was to do whatever was needed to create a functional and engaging site that made it easy for people to learn English.

Uncanny Owl did everything from copywriting and design to custom plugin development and implementation. Using LearnDash for LMS capabilities, we created a robust learning platform that can accommodate thousands of global learners.

Issues and Solutions

The site we took over was broken in a number of key areas. Because we didn’t know what had been created or how, we ended up abandoning the existing WordPress platform. We were able to salvage some course materials, like quizzes, but most elements needed to be rebuilt. While we never like to have clients pay to essentially perform the same work twice, the state of the platform and our own peace of mind left us with few alternatives.

The biggest challenge we faced with the English in 30 Minutes site was the sheer size of the program. It was (and remains) the largest LearnDash implementation we’ve undertaken, with approximately 2,300 unique LearnDash posts across 25 courses. By default, the LearnDash plugin looks up topics and completion status across all courses when it generates sidebars and table elements, which significantly affected performance for the site. We were seeing average load times of 12 seconds on LearnDash pages, which was unacceptable for users and also made it painful on the admin side. By changing LearnDash core code so that MySQL queries weren’t as broad, we were able to get LearnDash load times under 2 seconds. Developing this solution was a huge win for us and prompted this reaction from our client: “Guys – THANK YOU! I keep playing with it, jumping from page to page…incredible! I am over the moon with this!!!”

English in 30 Minutes was also the first LearnDash site we’ve deployed that doesn’t use a visible sidebar for navigation. As the program is very heavy on video-based training, the learner experience for videos had to be very strong. To accommodate a large post area, for video as well as some of the interactive games on the site, we created a collapsible sidebar that’s hidden by default. When the learner needs it, they click a prominent icon and the sidebar slides out. As the program is generally completed linearly, ad hoc navigation between lessons and topics doesn’t need to be used often and lends itself better to being hidden by default.

To improve navigation with the sidebar hidden, we added custom breadcrumb capabilities to the site. Out of the box, breadcrumbs typically don’t work on LearnDash sites, because the theme doesn’t know how to look up relationships between LearnDash courses, lessons and topics. Our plugin does, and it makes navigation up to higher points in the program easy.

Key Architecture Details

English in 30 Minutes is a large program that’s sold directly to consumers on a membership basis. It leverages an affiliate program for marketing, some light gamification, interactive games (including flashcards and matching), account sharing restrictions and more.

We used Total as the theme for the site (using a child theme and custom plugins). We chose Total because it generally works well with LearnDash, it’s reasonably straightforward for clients to manage, and it does what we need it to do. It also has a reasonably large userbase and active development.
Here’s a list of some key plugins used on the English in 30 Minutes site:

AffiliateWP
BadgeOS
Gravity Forms
LearnDash
Ninja Kick: Sliding Panel
Paid Memberships Pro

The live site is hosted at Flywheel. The site performs well there, the interface is nice for clients, and the managed services means we can focus on the site rather than the infrastructure.

Results

Englishin30Minutes.com has only been live for 1 week, but so far it’s had almost 300 unique visitors from around the world with no marketing. Getting the first unsolicited sign-up for an account was a big step, and we’re excited about English in 30 Minute’s growth!

Of course, our most important measures are making sure our client is happy with our work and is left with a capable learning platform. Here’s what he had to say about that:

I really cannot speak highly enough about the guys at Uncanny Owl. They were actually my 3rd design team for this project and I only wish I had found them first! Their commitment, innovation, advice, patience and support have been outstanding, even when I fell behind at times with my work schedule, and I make a point of using their name in recommendation in any discussion I have regarding the site. They definitely went the extra mile with this one, in particular the page load speed fix and breadcrumb plugin were very impressive indeed, and I look forward to a long-term partnership with them for the future.

Visit englishin30minutes.com to see a sample of our work in action. It’s also a great resource (and certainly one of the most comprehensive) for learning English online!