Bored Teachers not-so-boring website. | Massive Pixel Creation

The Bored Teachers team began the search for a web development company that could deliver new solutions, filled with new features and materials, like new meme subpage, podcasts, entries on different topics, materials to download, or newsletter. Not only that, the new website would have to be able to endure huge traffic seamlessly and be prepared for further extension, as Bored Teachers keep on expanding.

With user satisfaction in mind, they envisioned a new website that’s clear and comprehensive, with plenty of additional content and features. They had many goals, such as:

• Changing their old website style to match current design trends;
• Enhancing their SEO structures;
• Decreasing the bounce rate;
• Enhancing the overall speed of the website;
• Creating the new, up-to-date design;
• Adding podcast and video player;
• Fixing problems with the website being overloaded;
• Allowing the client’s team to easily add new sites without programming knowledge.

There was a company that Bored Teachers found capable of delivering an entirely new Single Page Application solution. That company was MPC and we have been entrusted with the project. The MPC software development team that had reported for duty consisted of two developers, one designer, one QA, and one Project Manager.

Before the development even started the MPC team had three workshop meetings with Bored Teachers that lasted for a week. The workshops were conducted using the design thinking method. The main objective of these meetings was to go through the resources, evaluate the project goals, prioritize MVP release, choose a technological solution, and estimate the time for development.

Firstly, the users’ behavior had to be identified, therefore a survey with actual users of the current website has been conducted to determine their needs. Secondly, the path of an average user has been checked to see how they operate. Additionally, user story mapping has been used to dissect the tasks into workable chunks to prioritize them towards MVP delivery. Bored Teachers have been putting smiles on the faces of the fellow teachers for a while now. They built a strong user base with over 2 million followers on their Facebook fanpage! However, the time for change has come and the decision has been made.

During the workshops, the team discussed the design and functionality of the website, along with the previously mentioned requirements of Bored Teachers and the solutions that the team has prepared.

Most of the Bored Teachers website traffic comes from mobile phones, therefore the first thing to do was to start working on the overhaul of the mobile version. Our development team went through creating a new menu that allows the users to easily navigate the entire website, to creation of new designs, subpages, and animations. What has been done, was not only giving the website a breath of fresh air in terms of design but also, when it comes to technology, conducting complete scrapping of their current platform and rebuilding it from scratch.

The MPC team communicated with Bored Teachers via different means. The most common way was exchanging messages on Slack, whenever something important was worth discussing. The team also held regular meetings conducted on Google Meet every Friday, to discuss progress and potential issues. Additionally, to have one source of scope among MPC and the client’s team, we used Jira – an industry standard for Project Management tools.

The main goal of the project was to deliver the state-of-the-art solution that would be able to handle huge traffic while delivering content to the educators without any impact on the performance. Moreover, the project kept evolving over time depending on end-customer demands, so it needed to be expandable enough to introduce new features that are in line with Agile methodology. Bored Teachers have also been equipped with a custom page builder with Gutenberg support for some pages or posts depending on Custom Post Types. Thanks to that, Bored Teachers can quickly and efficiently edit the contents of their website, which in different circumstances could result in an additional day of developer’s work and raise the costs significantly. With this solution, it can be done in a matter of hours, even without being tech-savvy.

Bored Teachers will definitely keep on growing along with their user base and expanding their presence in the online world. The entirely redesigned new website is essentially a Single Page Application that keeps using WordPress to easily manage content for a non-tech user but is powered with the Vue framework on the front-end side. That allows a glitchless and smooth user experience. When it comes to communication with the back-end, it’s done via GraphQL, which speeds up the load time and can handle large numbers of users on the website.

The separation of front-end from back-end can not only make it more scalable but also make the optimization and any potential additions to the code a lot faster and easier to implement. What’s more, Single Page Application can make the lives of both the user and developer a bit easier, for example, users could register on the website using Facebook.

The Bored Teachers website is now more complete than ever before and can serve as an after-hours place for educators even better! Additionally. the MPC development team has added a podcast feature and a player. Its speed performance has also been raised, its structure has been optimized and it’s now bigger of a pleasure to browse through the website than ever before.