How Kreative Kurse Increased Their Subscribers With WP Event Manager

Company introduction

Kreative Kurse is a company that displays various courses in the field of art and maintains a website where all the courses are published.

Story behind the company

Kreative Kurse has a unique story behind its establishment. The CEO Torsten Reichardt started his career as a freelance web designer and had expertise in building WordPress sites. He used to create WordPress sites for additional income. Building WordPress sites was his passion and he used to serve small businesses and solo entrepreneurs in particular.

I work as a freelance web designer and have specialized in building WordPress websites. It started as a side hustle because I enjoy building websites and because I could use the additional income. Plus, my primary job is seasonal, so I have plenty of time during the winter. The websites I build are mainly for other solo entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Inspiration behind the project

One day the CEO received a call from a woman who took his contact details from a classified advertisement that he has given for his web designing business. She expressed that she wanted to sell her website that she had built as she did not want to continue maintaining it. He was skeptical about accepting the offer and asked for some more details on the same.

He came to know that the website was created in 2003 on which art schools and other providers of creative courses and classes used to list their offerings for a yearly subscription fee.

Here are the problem areas that he discovered on the website:

• The website was not updated and the last facelift was more than a decade old. 
• The appearance of the website was also not up to the mark. 
• The business behind the website had to suffer a lot for this. 
• About ¾ of subscribers had canceled their subscription. 
• The amount of courses published on the website was only a fraction (< 10%) of its all-time high.

Even after noticing all these problem areas, Torsten Reichardt found potential in it and took up the challenge and agreed to take over the website. He immediately started working on it using WordPress.

Challenges Kreative Kurse had to overcome

Here are the challenges he faced:

• The website was custom-made in PHP, without any Content Management System. 
• He had to build a new website from scratch with all the features that the subscribers used on the old website. 
• The biggest challenge was to make all the arrangements within a very short period of time as the old website’s PHP version was about to be switched off by the website’s hosting provider. This simply meant that the website was about to stop working.

Project requirements

Torsten Reichardt had some specific requirements for this project. These include the following:

Besides, making improvements to the websites he was in search of a WordPress plugin that would help him.

• display courses on the frontend and.
• allow his  subscribers to publish or edit these courses from an organizer dashboard.

He also emphasized on the fact that he was looking for a plugin and not a theme because he was using the Divi theme at that time and did not want to switch. The best part about WP Event Manager is that it is compatible with the Divi theme.

• The organizer’s dashboard needed to be user-friendly as most of his subscribers did not have technological background but they needed to be able to publish their courses on the website without assistance.

“I needed a WordPress plugin that would be able to display courses on the frontend and allow my subscribers to publish or edit these courses from an organizer dashboard. Also, it should be a plugin, not a theme, because I use the Divi theme for my WordPress websites and I am quite familiar with it. So I did not want to use any other theme. The event management plugin should therefore be compatible with the Divi theme.

Because the subscribers don’t have a technology background but need to be able to publish their courses on the website without assistance, the organizer dashboard needed to be very user-friendly.”

How did Kreative Kurse connect with WP Event Manager

The CEO shared that he found WP Event Manager by searching on the internet where he came across various other event management plugins. After a detailed research on all of them he picked up WP Event Manager.

The main reason behind it is that most of the other plugins he found were good on the frontend but when it comes to the backend, they differed in features, usability and customization options. He had to reject most of them while testing due to lack of features and complicated usage. However, WP Event Manager passed all the tests he initiated with the following advantages:

• An easy-to-use organizers dashboard.
• A great looking frontend.
• Several add-ons. 
• Easily customizable.
• Free core plugin.
• Affordable premium addons.

“The only plugin that was up to the task was WP Event Manager. WP Event Manager seemed like a great fit for my project, because it offers an easy-to-use organizer dashboard, a great-looking frontend and several add-ons for easy customization. So I decided to build the new website around this plugin.”

“What I also like is the fact that the main plugin of WP Event Manager is free to download, you only need to pay for the add-ons, if you need any. I have so far purchased 3 add-ons, and think they are reasonably priced given the value they provide.”

The addons that Kreative Kurse used for its project

Besides the core plugin, Kreative Kurse utilized the following plugins from WP Event Manager for its project.

Emails: Kreative Kurse has used the Emails plugin to let organizers know about the events that have expired already.

Google Maps: Besides appreciating our Google Maps addon for its utility, the founder has also suggested us to add a new feature that will make it possible for users to use a shortcode to show events within a certain range around a given city and have the German states as locations.

Registration: this addon was used by Kreative Kurse for a short period of time as their organizers did not want to have the bookings for their events in two different places that includes their own websites and the Kreative Kurse website.

Contact organizer: This is another plugin that they are using to bridge the gap between organizers and others associated with the events. They are dealing with some issues related to this plugin and contacted our support team for assistance.

The features that Kreative Kurse loved the most in WP Event Manager

The features that helped Kreative Kurse build their official website include the following:

• The possibility to add and edit events by the organizers through the frontend organizer dashboard and the freedom for admins to make changes to these events through the backend. 
• The ability to arrange events in order with shortcodes is another feature that impressed the CEO as it allows him to display the events on his website as per his preference. 
• The option to extend the core plugin through addons has made his work easy and he also shared that he is planning to add some more addons from WP Event Manager to his bag. 
• One of the crucial features for which Kreative Kurse has picked up WP Event Manager is the Divi theme compatibility. This feature has made his work easier as he uses the Divi theme for his website. 
• He has also mentioned about the built-in SEO functionality in the list of features that he liked the most in WP Event Manager.

The improvements Kreative Kurse noticed after using WP Event Manager

In Spite of all the challenges he faced that are mentioned above, WP Event Manager has helped him relaunch his new website and that too a week ahead of the deadline. He soon spread the news among his existing subscribers about his new website and surprisingly received a very positive response.

His subscribers requested for a few more features to add that he successfully added with the help of WP Event Manager;s support team through e-mails and zoom calls.

“Thankfully, I was able to relaunch the new website one week ahead of the deadline. I informed the existing subscribers about the new website and the feedback was – without a single exception – very positive. Some of the subscribers made further feature requests that I was able to incorporate into the website. In doing so, I ran into some smaller issues with the plugin. But the support team of WP Event Manager assisted me in solving them through e-Mails and Zoom calls. Their help was greatly appreciated.”

Here are changes he discovered:

• After relaunching the website, he was successful in stopping the decline in subscribers. 
• The number of subscribers increased remarkably. 
• A visually appealing website. 
• A user-friendly dashboard. 
• The number of courses published on the website was doubled up within two months. 

“After I relaunched the website with WP Event Manager, I was able to stop the decline in subscribers, in fact, their number even increased. Also, because the new website looks good and the organizer dashboard is easy to handle even for non-computer-savvy people, the number of courses published on the website more than doubled in the first 2 months after the relaunch (+ 119%).”

Kreativekurse.de was thoroughly impressed with WP Event Manager and was highly satisfied with the services it provided to it. The CEO also recommended people to try out the core as it is absolutely free.

He said “Because the plugin itself is free, I would suggest that you just give it a try. Start with the standard configuration and then customize it to your liking. A good idea is to take a look at the help center, especially the tutorial videos. If you watch them in the right order, these videos will guide you step by step through setting up WP Event Manager.“

WP Event Manager is a versatile and easy to use event management plugin with a very nice frontend look, plenty of great add-ons and a very dedicated support team.

Torsten Reichardt, CEO
Kreativekurse