Open Water Swimming Membership and Blog system deployment

We are proud to announce that we just launched www.OpenWaterSwimming.com WordPress website, Woocommerce store, membership portal, and news hub for the open water swimming community. The site and company benefit from a ton of content by one of the founders. They originally had it on Blogger,  but we were able to write a script to grab almost a Gig of data and 18,000 blog articles and import it into the new WordPress system and domain. Within a few days Google indexed the site and started funneling a ton of traffic to the site. Their article writing continually gives this system plenty of traffic and new users too.
After the import, Atwoodz went to work on the ecommerce portion of the site (our specialty) with Membership packages and a custom flow outside the parameters of the Ultimate Member plugin abilities. After adding a couple of other plugins that were needed to give the business model life, the typical WordPress issues surfaced – like WordPress is not made for much beyond informational websites and blogging. But in order to get the organization off the ground, we needed an inexpensive platform to get the MVP going. Se we began to customize the rest of the plugins, especially the Badges OS plugin, which fell flat on its face as soon as we started to position the features of the plugin around the flow and function it had within the WordPress system – as an accomplishment metric for the badges swimmers get when they complete certain open water swims.
Some of the other features that we added were an Event Calendar and listing system that organizers can post their events on the site and with all the traffic that OpenWaterSwimming.com get, would send that targeted demographic to their own individual event registration websites. Then there needed to be additional features added to that plugin and feature so that Members could add the Event as a Bucket List item on their profile page. From there Members and Event Managers can communicate about events through a custom review system that was built using Formidable Forms.
The strategy is to build upon this MVP and gain users and sponsors in the tight knit open water swim community. After this system gains traction, we’ll look to build a custom solution for www.OpenWaterSwimming.com that will not come with all the conflicts that WordPress inherently comes with.