IgnitionDeck Website Refresh Project

The original crowdfunding platform for WordPress needed a little love and a website refresh.

Project Overview

The first crowdfunding plugin for WordPress needed a thoughtful make-over

IgnitionDeck is a long-running plugin powering over a thousand websites’ fundraising campaigns and crowdfunding efforts. It’s been around since 2008 and their website absolutely looked its age.

The IgnitionDeck website was a collection of static pages, product pages, and documentation pages. DigiSavvy determined that it would be beneficial to break up the site and separate

The Challenge

IgnitionDeck was long overdue for a website redesign. The website worked just fine, but it was dated, like your parent’s friend who is still rocking that feathered hair look from the 1970s in 2022. Twenty Ten called and wanted their damn visuals back!

There were a lot of technical hurdles we had to overcome within the plugin itself before we could turn our attention to redesigning the website and make it over with a new bucket of paint.

Some of the hurdles mentioned above were:
– Hard-coded website templates
– Custom landing pages existing outside of WordPress
– Plugin was tied to the actual marketing website; if the website broke so did the plugin licensing system

The issues were numerous and made us feel like making big updates to that website meant taking on a silly amount of risk. So the decision was made to hold off on major updates until the new website was launched.

Licensing woes
The licensing built into IgnitionDeck was legacy code and it had some limitations. It didn’t do a great job of sending reminders to customers whose licenses were expiring; it also didn’t do a great job of preventing customers from using and updating expired licenses—that ultimately costs time and money to the business and directly impacts the bottom line.

The Solution

DigiSavvy came in and delivered a new website built with WordPress standards and conventions in mind, which meant taking full advantage of the block editor.

Separation of Concerns

The new IgnitionDeck website was going to mark a point in time, a line in the sand and that’s because things were changing with how the site was run. Previously, the website sold products, managed campaigns, among other things; it did TOO MUCH. The new IgnitionDeck website would do a lot less and focus on being a marketing engine rather than a jack of all trades and master of none.

With that in mind, we felt the prudent decision was to make the software licensing and member website its own instance and the marketing website would be a separate instance. We did this because we believe the more code you add to any codebase the more brittle that codebase becomes.

Our Approach

DigiSavvy built and redesigned and rebuilt the ignition.com website with the following features:

  • A clean, built from the ground up, a theme that used fewer resources.
  • We moved their website to Pantheon’s Managed Hosting platform.
  • We spun up a separate EDD website for members and product sales
  • Full integration of the block editor to make managing content easier as well as spinning up new landing pages quickly.

Rolling out a new licensing system

For the software and membership capabilities, we rolled out Easy Digital Downloads, which handles software licensing pretty damn well. With EDD in place, IgnitionDeck now has a proven tool that can check and validate licenses, send out reminders, and provides the ability for customers to self serve, update and upgrade their licenses manually; before that wasn’t possible.

The Results

The IgnitionDeck team now has a much easier website to manage; they can easily create marketing campaigns and content to bolster their product’s visibility. Not only that, the team feels confident and good about their new online web presence. You can’t put a price or a value on that! Being able to market the plugin effectively will lead to more traffic and more sales down the road.

EDD now sends out reliable license expiration notices, alerting customers they need to renew, which will lead to more sales year to year.

We did this for them and we can do this for you, too!

Read our related blog post regarding this launch.