How we built the Divi Framework Website
Outdated Post: I have now moved to Freemius for our plugin delivery. We also changed our name from Divi Framework to MRK WP.
I recently thought it would be a great idea to share with people how we built the Divi Framework Website. We really like what we have built and intend to keep it growing and advancing as a premium location to purchase plugins for your Divi powered websites.
The Original Idea of Divi Framework
Our Team has been building WordPress and PHP based websites for over 10 years under the name M R K Development Pty Ltd, which is now M R K Websites.
The team has made all sorts of addons and tools for Divi that made development more simple, so we decided we should make a site to sell them and see if other people were interested.
When we saw just how popular Divi Builder was becoming, we decided it would be valuable to the WordPress community, and to Divi Theme users, to create plugins and training to help you get more out of your WordPress websites using Divi from Elegant Themes.
The idea for using all of these tools – that we use every day – as a framework was born and we registered the domain name diviframework.com and got started planning our website.
Want to learn about the difference between a framework and libraries? Read more information here.
The Challenge of an Ecommerce Site
The team began planning the Divi Framework website. When building this Ecommerce site we would have a unique challenge. We had to ensure that the site is trustworthy. It has great UX and has the technical features to deliver the products that we are going to be selling. It had to be Robust.
In the case of Divi Framework, we wanted to sell software and needed API Activations for our plugins. We also wanted e-learning wrapped into the site that has blogging, knowledge base articles and membership tools all in one.
WooCommerce was the solution for this complex build. It is able to be flexible enough to give all these features in a relatively short amount of time. This is in a large part because of the community around WordPress and WooCommerce.
We picked out plugins to help us with our core features and got moving with the development of the website.
The Core Features
Our core features right now on Divi Framework are:
- WooCommerce Memberships Plugin. I use this to manage the membership aspect of the site.
- WooCommerce Subscriptions. I use this to integrate with the subscription settings of each product.
- WooCommerce API Manager. Integrated with all our products to allow API Key registration and activation.
- WooCommerce Zapier. This is used to help track all our orders and inject key information into tracking spreadsheets and our CRM.
- WooCommerce Mailchimp Integration. We use MailChimp to track what people are purchasing. Knowing what they have purchased helps us communicate to customers in a personalised way.
- WooCommerce Google Analytics. We use this tool to better track orders and analytics on the site.
- WooCommerce Auto Complete. This open source tool auto completes orders as we have a electronic payment system and virtual delivery of product.
- WooCommerce PDF Invoices. We use this to generate a PDF invoice for each customer. This was part of our due diligence in putting together a great website with best practices in Australia. Australia is our country of operation.
- WooCommerce Stripe. The final part of the puzzle, we use Stripe to take payments.
These are just the WooCommerce areas of the site. It works well for us. All those connected parts provide specific functional needs within our store.
Other Plugins and Features
We use Divi from Elegant Themes as our main theme and page builder. This made it really easy to get a long way fast with our website. We also had a few challenges to deal with but this was mainly due to the Divi theme. The fix required was custom layouts.
To solve the problem we created a child theme to deal with these challenges. This allowed us to customise product tabs and the product pages to the unique requirements of our products. It also allowed better support pages to be created.
The software requires very specific theme requirements because of the nature of your product. The software product page integrates with our FAQ tool. It also links to the Knowledge base and Changelog plugin. These were all developed as custom WordPress Plugins.
This integration is a great time saver. When we update our Change Log, FAQ or Knowledge Base the product page is also up to date.
This makes for great efficiency on our site and means we don’t have to repeat ourselves.
SEO and Marketing
SEO is of huge importance for anyone creating an eCommerce website. Getting found by customers that are looking for you is so important.
To help the Divi Framework get great rankings we use Yoast Premium Plugins.
This has helped us get Divi Framework ranking well in a short amount of time which is very important to ensure we can grow this business.
We use the Yoast Premium Plugin, Yoast WooCommerce Plugin and the Yoast Video Plugin together to make some great XML sitemaps and make our pages rank well.
We then took our search engine console data and google analytics data and brought the whole picture together using data studio.
Data Studio from Google allows us to keep track of our rankings and check we are going in the right direction.
We can also pull this data to make sure that we are tracking on our youtube channel as product videos and tutorials are essential to the usage of our products which are very technical.
Hosting and Page Speed
Using Google Cloud Hosting with Kinsta has meant we can use HTTP/2 and ensure we have a fast loading website which is increasingly important especially when it comes to online selling.
Kinsta has been a great partner in helping us deliver a really fast page speed.
Moving Forward
We will be rolling out a full e-learning package using LearnDash. This should foster more of a community website for people using WooCommerce and Divi.
I’d like to release other great plugins and contribute to open source as well. Ambitious enough for you?
2019 Update
After 2 years we successfully did everything we planned in this post. Wow. A great journey. Now we have migrated to new tools but at the core it’s WordPress and Open Source. I cant wait to see what the next 2 years hold for us.
