Liberating Midlife—Course Launch

“Liberating Midlife” started out as the vision of two women who took a good, hard look at the narrative about midlife and aging that our society offers women and said—Eff. That. 

They felt that they could communicate a more empowering, inspiring message, and they started building a series of workshops to pass on the good news, with the idea that they would fill their courses by sending potential participants to a custom landing page hosting an online enrollment form. 

But there was a problem: they were essentially starting from zero in terms of digital experience & infrastructure, and they had only four weeks max to get things up and running. Enter Elevation Works. 

Challenges

Tight Deadline: given the need to align both coaches and their separate business operations behind this objective, four weeks was a short timeframe for the project, demanding efficient planning, execution, and clear communication to ensure an entire enrollment system was online in time to fill the workshop.

Aesthetic Match: the landing page’s design needed to echo the existing online aesthetics of both of the workshop’s leaders, while simultaneously branding the workshop as an independent entity.

Squarespace Customization: both of the coaches were already familiar and somewhat comfortable with Squarespace, and wanted their landing page to be hosted on the platform. We needed to overcome Squarespace’s rigid design principles and e-commerce limitations to get the look and feel they were going for, while still maintaining functionality for optimal conversions.

The Back End: the native Squarespace sales system is powerful but finicky, and it can be a challenge to take advantage of specific features that serve small, independent entrepreneurs and leave the rest of its capabilities behind. The system also works better for some types of products and services than others, and if what you’re doing doesn’t fit the mold, bending Squarespace to your will can take some doing. 

What we did

Aesthetics & Strategy Alignment: we started out by diving into research and entering into an ongoing dialogue with the client, with the goal of internalizing Liberating Midlife’s brand vision and developing a deep understanding of their ideal workshop participant. (All subsequent development choices, from payment architecture to page copy to button color, sprang from this root, so it was important to get it right.) Then we took the client’s preferred aesthetic approach and merged it with conversion strategy, landing page design, user interface, and sales copy that was all optimized for one goal: selling as many workshop seats as possible.

Optimizing Within Constraints: the client preferred Squarespace, which is somewhat notorious for its “our-way-or-the-highway” approach to customization, and consequently not usually our first choice for a project like this. Not a problem, though! We got creative with custom code workarounds to make sure the design satisfied the client’s form and function needs, and not Squarespace’s brand imperatives. 

Translating Into Web: the coaches had already created a good deal of their course content by the time we got started with the landing page, but it was in the shape of long-form prose, scripts and lesson plans. Our job was to take the essence of all of this knowledge and wisdom, help mold it into a compelling sales pitch that inspired their ideal customers to enroll in the workshop, and then express it in the language of the web, where image choice, font pairings and color theory can mean as much or more than the actual words they’re accompanying.

Building the Money Machine: Squarespace is a design-first company, and given their wild success, it’s hard to argue with that approach. However, all of the sales tools they offer for creative businesses can feel like something of an afterthought, requiring some committed spelunking through all the hidden sub-menus of their admin dashboards in order to design and build the perfect selling machine.

We created a custom sales process that routed credit card payments to the coaches’ accounts, allowed select customers to claim discounts with secret codes, provided the coaches with contact information for every new signup, and was prepared to send each enrollee a series of follow-up emails to make sure they were ready for the workshop.