Palomitas de matiz

Businesses, like people, change and evolve over time. As of today (January 2024), this website is no longer available. In September 2023, Samuel decided to unify his different brands (Gramatices, Palomitas de matiz, and Samuel Rísquez) into one. This reduces maintenance costs, not only financially, but also in time and mental effort. Currently, only Gramatices is in operation.

Context

Samuel has been teaching Spanish for over 15 years. He has various sources of income – private students, a language school (Instituto Cervantes) and a university’s language school, among others. When COVID struck, he moved to online teaching – an experience which proved to be very successful. This sparked his desire to establish an online presence and create his own brand, in order to find students and help them learn Spanish. His ultimate goal is to create an online membership where students will be able to attend live webinars and learn from prerecorded material and courses.

Proposed Solution

After talking about his goals and analysing different options, we came up with the following solution, divided into two main stages: creating a standard website with a blog, and creating the academy/membership website.

First Stage: Creation of a standard website with a blog

Main page of the blog in Spanish. It shows a menu bar at the top, a screen-wide image with the headline "Gana confianza en español y comunícate sin esfuerzo". — Main Page (in Spanish)

Blog page. A grid shows the different posts covering various topics. — Main Page (in Spanish)

Getting known

This website is used to get his name out there and as an entry point for students who may be interested in his services. Apart from the blog, where he writes about relevant topics for learning Spanish, the website offers information about his private lessons and includes a contact form.

Languages

The website is bilingual (in Spanish and English). Although Samuel’s main target are students who already know some Spanish, he’s aware that it’s easier to revert to the students’ first language when dealing with certain topics. In consequence, I used a plugin so that the website’s content could be easily translated and is properly tagged with the right language. The translated pages can be mapped to each other, so that whenever the user wishes to change the language of the content, they can click on the language switcher link and will automatically be taken to the corresponding content, if it exists.

Integrated Calendar

It includes an integration with Calendly, which allows Samuel’s students to book directly through the application, by choosing an available slot in Samuel’s schedule. Once they do, Samuel’s availability is automatically updated and the new appointment appears automatically on his Google Calendar.

Second Stage: Creation of the membership website

In the summer of 2022, this stage was put on hold, as Samuel decided to create a membership for teachers, instead of students. For more details of this project, you can check the Gramatices portfolio page.

Membership

This will be installed in a subdomain (such as https://academy.palomitasdematiz.com), so in all effects it will be a different website. We decided to separate them so that the websites can operate independently from each other, making it easier to deal with issues if they ever occur. It also means that each website contains only the required plugins and not more. For example, in this case, the translation plugin is not necessary, but in contrast to the “main” website, it requires a plugin to create the courses and their content.

Results

At the time of writing (Summer 2022), the main benefits are the following:

Personal Brand

Samuel now has a website that he can use to build his own personal brand and establish an online presence as a teacher of Spanish.

Expertise

He can use the blog as a way to show his expertise to prospective students, by writing about the Spanish language.

Media

The blog is complemented by his YouTube channel and his Instagram Reels, where he deals with different grammar topics and gives advice.

Booking Lessons

Students can book classes with him directly through the website, choosing any of the available slots in Samuel’s schedule. This automatically updates his calendar.

Bilingual

Prospective students can find content in both English and Spanish, which is also part of Samuel’s brand – the ability to explain some concepts in English if necessary.

Social Media Hub

The website also includes a page that acts as a hub for all his social media accounts, in a similar style to Linktree – but without any additional costs.

If you’re interested in knowing more detail, the technical and design characteristics are these:

The typography (fonts) and the website’s colours harmonize with the logo and his brand. Samuel’s brand is “professionally informal”. He’ll do the work as expected, but he’s approachable.
Of course, the website is GDPR-compliant. Any non-essential cookies created by third-party services can be disabled.
It adapts automatically to any device’s screen size (it is a responsive website), thus avoiding horizontal scrolling, among others.
The website is backed up regularly to a remote server, so that in the event that something goes very wrong, Samuel will be able to recover all the data.
Contact forms can sometimes stop working if the server blocks the sending of e-mails. In order to avoid any issues, the website stores any sent forms so that they are never lost.