Bored Teachers

Taking care of students requires a lot of patience. Everyone had to go through school at some point, and we can all tell how exhausting the job must be for the teachers. Creating tests, correcting homework, giving marks—they do it all! There is one place, though, where the teaching brethren can unwind, relax, and reset after a long and exhausting day. What better way to do so online than a website filled with funny videos, memes, tips, recommendations, and more?

You can even find articles on how to manage your class or ideas that might just make teaching a little bit easier. The Bored Teachers platform has been around for 5 years, and it doesn’t plan on going away. On the contrary, it plans to keep on expanding! So, let’s celebrate educators every day together!

Goal

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 subpages, podcasts, entries on different topics, download materials, or newsletters. The new website would also have to endure huge traffic seamlessly and be prepared for further extension as Bored Teachers keeps 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;
• Strengthening the overall speed of the website;
• Creating a new, up-to-date design;
• Adding podcast and video player;
• Fixing problems with the website being overloaded;
• Allowing the client’s team to add new sites without programming knowledge quickly.

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

Process

Before development even started, the WPKraken team had three one-week-long workshop meetings with Bored Teachers. The workshops were conducted using the design thinking method. The main objectives of these meetings were to review the resources, evaluate the project goals, prioritize the MVP release, choose a technological solution, and estimate the development time.

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 solid 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 website’s design and functionality, 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 created a new menu that allows users to easily navigate the entire website, creating 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 WPKraken 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 on Google Meet every Friday to discuss progress and potential issues. Additionally, to have one source of scope among WPKraken 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. This solution can be done in a matter of hours, even without being tech-savvy.