Minea.Nails

Creating the site

Requirements for the site were to be done with as little money as possible and to be easily maintained so she wouldn't have to send the courses with email after every purchase. I compared different online store platforms with monthly payments but all the free or cheapest versions were not suitable for selling online courses if wanting to avoid sending a lot of emails so I found the best (and cheapest) option to be to buy a domain and some space from a webhotel and build the site with WordPress and Woocommerce online store plugin.

Process

Minea wanted the site to be simple, just one page that shows all the courses and she liked her Linktree page's color palette so I just took some colors from her Linktree and put them on the site to see if it looks good. The storefront theme I picked up was really easy to modify and the actual site was done pretty quickly. WordPress also does the responsivity quite nicely automatically, but I did do some minor changes to the CSS.

Woocommerce is a plugin that turns a regular website into an online store and takes care of everything in the background. I changed all the settings to match how we wanted the site to be, such as calculating taxes according to the customer's location, removed shipping option and set the products to be downloadable so when the purchase is confirmed, the customer can download the course and watch it whenever.

To spare Minea from checking who's paid their courses and then activating their access to the content we needed a payment intermediary. I compared different ones like Klarna, Paytrail, Stripe etc and Klarna seemed to take the smallest commissions from the payments so we chose Klarna. The process was really simple: you left an application and after checking your store has everything needed, you got the credentials needed for linking Klarna with your store.

When you're selling around the world you need to have translations for your website available. I tried multiple translation plugins but Weglot had the best quality in it's translations. All of the plugins I tried had of course a better version available at a cost where you could modify the translations, but with Weglot you could modify some of them with the free version too and there were not a lot of fixing. As a downside, the free version has a 2000 word wordlimit and it's almost used and we don't have descriptions for the courses yet so we might have to still upgrade it.

Instagram introduced a new subscription feature and Minea decided to use that one instead for the online courses, so there was no need for the online store in it's original format. She recently became a nail instructor for a nail product brand and she wanted to update the website to serve as her instructor pages, where you could also buy basic training courses as well as continuing education courses as private live courses. These courses were to sell only in Finland, so I got rid of all the localization stuff.

Updating the website

I added the new courses, made pages for them and updated the shop page with the new courses.

Then I made a new front page that has the different sections added in the navigation bar. The old color scheme was preserved throughout the website.

Because the course date has to be discussed with Minea beforehand, I had to do some testing with Klarna's API to make sure the payment doesn't get accepted before the order gets manually accepted after the date is agreed.