Building an Online Community - Vanesa Nicolosi

The Project
Vanesa Nicolosi first worked with Angulo Marketing & Design 6 months ago to build her brand and setup a website for her personal training business. You can read more about that project here: Branding Strategy & Site Design. The site outlined her services of 1:1 training, both online, and in-person, pole fitness, flexibility classes, and even nutritional coaching.

Just a couple months ago, she came to us with an idea to take her business to the next level: she wanted to build a community online where she could share her health and fitness related contents. The ideal solution would allow her to use those recipes, workouts, and articles that she had prepared but never shared to create an even more accessible pricing model for people who just need some extra resources to get going on their fitness journey. 

The Work
The first step was to help Vanesa visualize how this project could branch off from her current site and how it would be mapped out. Starting from the content library she envisioned, I came up with the plan to create separate hidden blog pages that would house each of her content sections: Recipes, Workouts, and Articles. To make these pages easy to use, I added a blog organizer to the top of each page which would help visitors navigate the content easily, and also included buttons to the other content sections.

The blog pages could be enough to launch this project, but they didn't look like we wanted them to. We wanted something cleaner, more like a series of thumbnails that are easily visible at one glance. With this in mind, I created a landing page for this new project that would show a preview of the content in a nice, clean way. Vanesa ended up purchasing a Weebly app called Bloggons that allowed me to embed portions of her content blogs in sleek "blog cards" that show only the title of the content, the main image, and a button to see the full page. Here's what it looks like. ​

As we wrapped up the work of posting the content into the respective blog pages, it was time to manage the access to these pages and work on the membership aspect of the project. We wanted the "home" page of this new community to be visible to all, but the actual content should be made accessible only to members who signed up. To do this, we used Weebly's membership features as well as the PaidMembers app to manage accounts and set visibility limits for different pages of Vanesa's site. After all was said and done, we ended up with 1) a public home page promoting the membership, 2) a private home page with clickable content thumbnails, and 3) private blog pages of content that are only visible and accessible by logged in members. Leading up to the launch date of this project, Vanesa and I tested the site multiple times, checking for inconsistencies, missing pieces, and broken links. When everything was ready to go, we turned our focus to promoting and marketing the big reveal and launch. 

Check out the Site

I worked with Vanesa to brainstorm some ideas for promoting the launch of the Stronger Together community and also helped put together a social media posting schedule for the 2 weeks leading up to the launch. We wanted to create some mystery and invite curiosity so in the first week, we started with 3 short teaser videos of Vanesa sitting at her computer working on the new pages of the site. Day by day, the video cameraman came closer and closer, finally revealing the site that Vanesa was hiding. For the grand finale,  I storyboarded and edited a promotional video to be the final piece in the social media posting schedule.  

Vanesa's Instagram

Stronger Together Promo Video by Janet Angulo

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Working with Vanesa on this project was a challenge, but it was so much fun and it has been really exciting to see this project come to fruition!
- Janet