Tom Ross

Website for Community Coach to connect with his community

Location

London, UK

Industry

Personal Brand,
Creator

Duration

3 Months

Services

UX Strategy

UI Design

Web Development

The Beginning

How we helped a community coach reach out to his community an integrated digital approach that helped a community coach reach
out to a larger community of fans.

Tom Ross is the proud CEO of Design Cuts, an incredible community of 500,000+ creatives engaged in churning out fantastic yet affordable designs for everyone. Besides designing and keeping his community engaged, Tom loves to help people with his experiences. He is a well-known community coach, passionate about helping his fellow creatives improve their marketing and build thriving communities through his podcasts Biz Buds and The Honest Designer Show.

An Innovative Approach
to Problem-Solving

At Team Codesign, we love listening to Tom’s podcasts. His ideas around designing and community-building have a lot of our team members hooked.

Interestingly, it was during one of his podcasts that Tom mentioned revamping his website. He said he wanted to create a unified hub for his audience to access all of his awesome content seamlessly.

As a UI/UX design agency, we were excited to bring Tom’s vision to life and contacted him on Instagram with a proposal regarding how we could help solve his problem.

The Beginning

Once we connected with Tom, we discussed his vision at length and what he wanted to achieve in the long run.We also went through his content, researched his audience, and helped him list the challenges that we sought to solve for him. Here’s a snapshot of what Tom wanted to drive through his website:

Knowledge about his services

Create a hub for his community to read his awesome content and listen to his podcasts with transcription included

Knowledge about his personality

Know him personally by reading his story

Monitization Goals

Besides improving the navigation to help visitors find helpful resources easily, we also identified the following monetization goals for Tom:

Converting subscribers

Convert visitors into newsletter subscribers so that they receive regular updates and information on joining his one-on-one coaching program eventually

Making it easier to contact Tom

Make it easier for corporates and individuals to contact him and invite him to speak at events

Increase downloads

Increase downloads for Tom’s handy and well-curated Community Manual. It’s a fabulous 175-page in-depth guide on community building that can be downloaded when you subscribe to his newsletter.

The Beginning

Before we kickstart the design process, we prefer to have some brainstorming sessions over endless coffee cups. So, before proceeding with the web development process for Tom, we started with a brainstorming session that focused on two questions:

1. Who is a business coach or a community coach?

2. What would one expect from a business or community
coach’s website?

Generally speaking, a coach (whether a life coach, business coach, or community coach) is someone who helps people gain clarity in specific aspects of their lives. Unsurprisingly, people expect a coach’s website to be simple, impactful, and clutter-free. Based on these inputs, we decided to create a clean design look for Tom’s website following the WYSIWYG principle - What You See Is What You Get.

To take this idea forward, we came up with a plan of creating 10 pages for Tom’s site.

Once the basic idea was ready, we moved to the visual design process. When we started, Tom was a little confused about what content should go in. But he was prompted by the team’s initial design to give more ideas.

In the call where he saw the first sketch, we used live sketching so he could give suggestions in real-time while we made edits on the landing page. We were able to complete the process to his satisfaction within 30 minutes. Based on the initial sketch, the complete wireframing was done in a single day and approved by Tom without any changes.

Given that Tom already has a significant following on Instagram, we were cautious about retaining his original branding to maintain consistency and drive an omnichannel experience. We used the same brand guidelines, like colors, font, and his amazing logo designed by James Martin, to convert the wireframe into visual design.

The same real-time collaborative approach was followed to finalize the remaining wireframes in record time and convert them into visual design. Tom was always part of the feedback process and very cooperative about pinning his feedback on XD links, which helped in reducing the turnaround time significantly.

Bringing the vision
to life

Once Tom finalized the designs, we started moving them to the building stage one by one. First, we kickstarted the front-end development of all the ten pages, where we took the same pages and designed them for both mobile and desktop.

View Live

We developed the site using WordPress with custom feeds and no editor or prebuilt themes for better speed and control.

Instead, we used custom-built HTML that we shifted to WordPress using the custom fields option. This enabled us to add a lot of flexibility regarding the various modules on the site, such as testimonials, subscriber lists, and cookie pro for subscribing to email lists, which is mandatory under the GDPR guidelines.

Client Testimonial

Team CoDesign delivered high-quality designs within a timely manner. Their communicative and creative approach supplemented their professional management style. Dealing with distance, the team made sure the process ran smoothly.