THE NEW SCHOOL OF ART

The Brief

The New School of Art needed an ecommerce WordPress website to promote and sell art courses online. The site needed to be easy for customers to use, optimised for search engines, and designed to convert visitors into course bookings and enquiries.

Alongside the original design and build, the site has continued to evolve over time. More recently, the school also needed a better way to manage income splits between tutors for online course sales — a monthly admin task that had previously taken several hours to complete manually.

The Solution

Ecommerce

WooCommerce was chosen as the ecommerce platform, although a significant amount of customisation was required to adapt it from a standard product store into a flexible course booking system.

To improve conversions, customers were given multiple options: they could pay in full, pay a deposit, or register their interest with an email address. This helped increase bookings while also building a valuable mailing list of warm leads. For popular courses, a waiting list feature was added, creating another useful lead-generation route while also helping the school gauge demand for future course dates.

Custom plugin development

The content management system was built so that course information could be entered once in the backend and then reused across multiple areas of the site. For example, PDF course information packs are automatically generated from the data stored on course product pages. This reduces admin time, avoids duplication, and helps ensure key course information remains consistent across the website and customer communications.

Online learning platform

A later phase of the project introduced online video courses. Because these required different ecommerce functionality, templates and customer journeys, they were developed as a separate WordPress installation on a subdomain, allowing the online course platform to be tailored specifically to digital content.

AI automation

More recently, I created an AI-assisted automation system to manage the monthly income split between tutors for online course sales. Previously, this was a time-consuming manual process that took several hours each month. The new system processes the sales data, calculates tutor allocations, and produces the required breakdowns automatically, turning a repetitive admin task into a much faster and more reliable workflow.

Design

The overall design was kept simple and elegant, using a restrained colour palette and considered font pairing to reflect the school’s visual identity while keeping the focus on the courses themselves.