Pea Horsley’s AnimalThoughts.com

Project Detail

Pea Horsley is an Internationally renowned animal communicator. She has been very successful for the last 11 years providing private consultations, workshops, and among her many other accomplishments has become a #1 best-selling author. Pea is dedicated to animal welfare, working with rescue organizations to help locate and help lost, abused or neglected animals. She is on a mission to teach and open the hearts of others so they too can learn how to communicate with animals.

Pea’s previous website had a ton of valuable information, however, it was a little difficult to navigate and was built using static html pages. Peaceful Media wanted to help Pea take her website to the next level in terms of content organization and simplifying the process for users to sign up for her workshops and retreats.

Peaceful Media, and in particular the two wonderful women I worked with directly, have been professional, friendly and patient during the entire process of recreating the essence of my work and my soul in the format of a digital shop front. It has been a delight to collaborate with such talented and caring people and I am very satisfied with the result.

– Pea Horsley, Founder of AnimalThoughts.com

TYPE

Custom Programming, ActiveCampaign, WordPress, GravityForms, eCommerce

PROJECT DETAILS

Peaceful Media’s goal was to move Pea’s existing static HTML site to a clean and modern WordPress. We used the Salient theme which gave us a nice platform to work from since we did not have the budget to do formal mood boards or page design mockups.

Pea trusted Peaceful Media to come up with new strategies to manage her website content and automate certain backend processes. We were able to plan a system that would streamline many of the challenges that she faced with the static site.

Our primary challenge was to figure out how to create a simplified user experience when signing up for her workshops and retreats. On the previous website there were a few pages you needed to click through in order to find workshop info, schedules and payment options. Users needed to download a PDF, fill out their personal info and email it back to Pea. We wanted to make this automated and sync it with her new CRM, ActiveCampaign, so she could easily capture all of this information in one place and all the user needed to do was fill out a simple online form.

Another challenge was creating a template for Pea’s events so she could easily create a new event in the backend of WordPress and have that dynamically update three places on the front end of her site. We developed custom post types to handle this.

Project Deliverables & Benefits

1. Customized WordPress Child Theme
   We used Salient as the parent theme and heavily customized the child theme for Animal Thoughts. This project budget did not allow for mood boards or design mockups so using Salient gave us some bells and whistles to start with including a great page builder.
2. Custom Post Type: Events
   We set out to make Pea’s life easier to add new events throughout her site without having to manually update several different pages. When she creates a new event, our system builds a beautiful event landing page and distributes the event details to the Workshops & Events page, footer, and sidebar. If an event is categorized as “Featured”, it’ll automatically post in chronological order to the Home page Upcoming Workshops & Events section as well. We gave each of the events a nicely designed “feature image card” and segmented them out by event category to make it easier to visually guide Pea’s clients to the right workshop or event for their Animal Communication level of experience.  All managed from one place!
3. Short Codes
   We were able to add custom input fields for Pea to easily enter details about her upcoming events by creating a custom post type. This allowed us to retrieve information about the event and display it dynamically in the sidebar, in the footer, the event ‘cards’ and in the workshop detail page (or future places we think of!). We created custom shortcodes to output the event information and styled it to be a self-contained ‘card’ to highlight the event and provide a way to learn more. There is a shortcode to output a single event and a shortcode to output a specified number of events in a certain category. We also created a shortcode to output a more simplified listing of upcoming events. All of these shortcodes were also mapped to Visual Composer – the site’s user-friendly page-builder. This way a content manager can easily add an event, or a cluster of events to a page without having to remember the shortcode or the parameters. The VC element has the choices as simple input options.
4. Custom Visual Composer Elements
   We’ve made it easy for Pea or any other site administrator to insert beautiful events call-outs, and lead generation magnets anywhere on the site — without messing with code.
5. eCommerce: GravityForms + Stripe + ActiveCampaign
   This was a major e-commerce integration using Gravity Forms, which is one of the best WordPress visual form builders, to allow us to create completely custom payment forms that are processed with the Stripe payment gateway. Each of Pea’s events and workshops required different information from the user. There were specific questions that the user needed to fill out when signing up for the event. These specific questions became custom fields in her CRM, ActiveCampaign. All the data that was submitted during the checkout process now became part of the user’s contact record in ActiveCampaign. This was something she was not able to do in her previous e-commerce solution which was PayPal. GravityForms allowed us to use conditional logic to enhance the checkout process with custom pricing options such as multi-pay and early-bird.