Over the past few months I’ve been working with John Ellsworth of Success-Strategies.com to implement a subscription platform for monetizing access to a spreadsheet-based financial tool. The tool itself is called Dairy Cash Flow Analysis, and presents as a detailed, well-formatted spreadsheet for determining dairy farm financial health. This in turn helps dairy owners modify their spending based on what the analysis reveals.

John’s website at success-strategies.com (not built by me originally) already had a WooCommerce store connected to a Stripe account for selling his e-books. The new challenge was to implement the spreadsheet as a page in WordPress with access to that page restricted behind a member paywall. New users needed to have an e-mail sent to them with an action to take verifying their account, and when they did so it should allow them to login with their new account.

All of this needed to work securely, and not negate any of the security measures I implement on all of my websites. But since I couldn’t work on the live site without botching things up, I created a test server and worked out the details there with my own Stripe account in developer mode.

Early last week I finished all testing and implemented the changes on the live website. I modified main menu navigation to include a My Account option, and beneath that I put conditional menus that appear or hide based on login status. I also added a Shop to the My Account sub-menu. On the home page, I modified an ad John had made, and used that add as a major promo piece that takes them to the Shop where they can start the process of becoming a member and getting access.

We’ve got Google Analytics connected to the website so we can see how effective John’s advertising and marketing efforts are, and what sorts of messaging people are responding too. It’s going to be very interesting over the next few months to see how much traffic and sign-ups we get.