In a nutshell; WordPress is open source, extremely powerful and easy to use if you have the right team for you.

Are you looking to get a membership website developed ?

Broadly you have 2 options when trying to get a membership website developed:

a) Use a packaged CMS or stand-alone solution or platform which provides membership functionality to your website
b) Develop a custom membership based website using custom programming on platforms such as Ruby, Python, Php-MySQL.

Unless you've a special need or specific reason for getting a custom membership done on custom programming we generally advice our clients on using Packaged CMS based functionality. We recommend WordPress as the base platform for this to all our clients and there are good reasons for doing so.

Let's look at this in detail.

Membership Functionality using Packaged, Standalone CMS

WordPress is perhaps the best example of a packaged standalone CMS. But to begin with, even core wordpress does not have in-built membership functionality. Membership sites can be built on the wordpress platform using Appropriate plugins, the right theme and some custom programming.

There are basically 3 elements to building your membership website on wordpress: theme, customizations and the plugin. A good website design agency will make sure all 3 of these work well together, are high quality, and come together with whatever custom functionality is required. At the end you get a fully functional membership website with payment gateway integration (if required) and many advanced features. Since WordPress is Open Source, your membership website functionality can be customized as required while configuring and using many of the features available through add-ons, plugins etc. Check out an example below of how a plugin setting can activate membership related functionality in a website.

Creating an Online Premium Content area in your website

Online Premium Content is one of the common ways in which you can monetize your site.
The strategy is to provide the user a snapshot of the useful content without restrictions, collect their information in exchange for something useful and finally convert them into a paying customer moving them to premium content. This is based on the 'Freemium' model. This premium content area is served only to 'members' which may or may not be paid but are certainly more involved with your website than casual / one-time visitors.
If there are membership levels in such a website, the website can also cater to different member areas and different type of contents using membership based access control. All this should be easy to configure from the admin area.

What information should you have ready when trying to develop a membership website?

Our advice to clients, entrepreneurs who want to hire an agency to get their membership website ready is - "Work on your Project Requirements and Specs please".

The biggest to the smallest IT projects become successful only when their requirements are clear and understood properly. At the most basic level , what this means is that you need to be clear on the features your membership website will require. Only on that basis can a web development company come up with project effort estimation, quotation, technology platform, 3rd party tools etc.
Here is a list of common features that a membership plugin can have.

• Membership Levels for Protected Content
• Simple Content Protection Unlocked with Registration without Payment
• Payment based Membership Subscription for Content
• Free Trial of Content Area
• Content Dripping and Level Completion
• Community Features such as : Quizzes, Forums, User Badges
• E-learning with protected video content integration
• Marketing features for Mailing List, Sharing, Affiliate Setup etc.

Creating News or Authority Articles related membership website

There are a few golden rules you have to keep in mind when you are providing a news or authority articles related membership website. It is slightly different from a simple blogging website because the idea is to drive membership, provide more, newer or premium content to the members while still catering to non-member visitors.

The Golden Rules for Authority and News Membership Websites

• The site must establish itself as authority in that area or provide frequent content if its a niche site.
• Must drive user action to sign up for emails if not for membership right away.
• Offer free membership or limited period membership if possible first and in most cases nobody will sign up to full paid membership plan till they've tried and tested.
• Have email marketing in place to convert email list users > members , members > paying members (if applicable )
• Provide content updates through email list, social media to users and have dedicated media Kit / media pages for the same.
• Have a facebook closed group, internal forum in place once the users grow.
• Member content protection and access controls in place
• Drive traffic to the website through great content, shareable news articles etc.

Developing Political Content related Membership Website

A political content membership website is somewhat different from a commercial membership website. The likely goal in such a website will be to reach out to prospective voters, engage and inform people about your policies and make them members, or ask for support pledge for various issues, campaign donation and so on. As a web design company, we look at the following when clients ask us to develop a NGO, Socio-Political website:

• Emphasis on Home page content and banners which outline the focus, ideologies, achievements of the institution
• Drive user engagement through articles, infographics, polls, videos on current issues which gel with the ideology of the client
• Provide options to become a volunteer, member for the party and possibly generate membership badge etc.
• Option for users to support the party with Donations (as allowed under law)
• Be informed and pledge attendance for key events and also get information on these events on email / phone
• Tools to help them register / check registration as voter etc.
• Pages /sections related to the key campaigns the party is running and also the key leaders.
• Enhanced security, moderation and loading performance due to the sensitivity of such a website
• Social Sharing and Commenting options at all suitable pages and posts

Building E-learning related Membership Website

E-Learning related membership sites can be very huge (think Udemy !) or smaller in scale but will generally require more work and skill than a normal membership website. Some of the features that a LMS or Learning Management System on WordPress will have are:

• Ability to Create, configure and Price a Course
• Protect the Content Area of the Course
• Divide course in Lessons or Levels and provide for Progression per Lesson
• Interactive features for Student to interact with the Tutor, ask questions etc.
• Get a teaser or some information of that course
• Pay for the course, either one-time or subscription based.
• Rate a course or instructor

One of the better WordPress Integrations for LMS (Learning Management System) on WordPress is LearnDash .

Couple of points to note here: A membership website does not automatically equal an e-learning course administration website. A few more nuts and bolts are needed for that. The second point to note is how to integrate videos in your course modules or units. This is important but video lessons and tutorials are now integral to any e-learning solution.

Youtube seems a most obvious way to embed content but a fool-proof way to protect youtube content is a problem. A possible solution to this is Vimeo as we can configure url which will be allowed to access or play that video.

Integrations that will help your membership site grow and flourish

WordPress is such a large and powerful platform. By creating your membership website on wordpress we're able to leverage the various integrations and marketing channels that wordpress allows us to utilize. Some of the key integrations we implement on membership sites include:

• Mailing List Integration with MailChimp, Aweber etc. to build and grow your mailing list
• Affiliate Management Systems to provide a new marketing channel for your courses, premium content
• Forum integration to build community through well established plugins such as BBPress
• Advanced Email Marketing Services such as Drip from LeadPages
• Analytics and Analysis tools such as Monster Insights

To Summarize: WordPress can be the best option for your membership driven website because it's:

a) Easier to create and configure such a website as compared to custom programming
b) Uses the inbuilt power of content creation through wordpress
c) Can leverage thousands of plugins, add-ons, integrations and powerful community
d) Easy to host and can work on a shared server as well ( actual hosting specs are decided based on your traffic etc. needs)
e) Just works fine and is a proven solution
f) Yes, you end up spending considerably lesser than developing a custom membership solution
g) Quicker to get ready for launch
h) Providing the benefit all the SEO features of WordPress.

So, if you're looking to get a website designed which requires membership, or e-learning, or news, community features - reach out and we'll analyze your requirements. All our initial consultation is free of charge. Our wordpress and Php programming experts will come up with the right solution for you and provide you a fixed transparent quotation.

Although WordPress makes owning and managing a membership website simpler than a custom solution, there is still a lot of work to be done related to configuring, customizing and designing, securing, integrating and marketing the website properly. Don't leave this all to chance and trial and error. An experienced web development company like ours can do the heavy lifting and let you concentrate on your core business area. Contact us here for a free consultation: Inquire Here