The skills and support I got from TechPixies helped me see my value in the workplace and rediscover my confidence. I’m now back working part time in a great local company.

TechPixies is an award winning social-enterprise that provides training and life coaching for women planning on returning to work, change careers or start a business.

Online learning platform

As part of my role as Chief Technology Officer for TechPixies I designed and built an online platform to enable the delivery of tech training courses around the world.

The platform enables visitors to purchase courses, track their progress and receive a certificates on completion. Course participants can create a profile to share their picture, neighbourhood, skills, and course progress with other participants, this is to encourage networking and peer-to-peer support.

Other website features include a blog, webinars (members-only), and gift certificates.

Wordpress course

I also created the curriculum for and taught our six-week course on WordPress site building. The course had a very practical focus and guided the students through the process of creating a website for a real client.

The main challenge with creating the course was the wide range of technical abilities. As most women on the course were returning to work after a break of 2 - 18 years we had to ensure that all ability levels were catered for.

To achieve this we had a large focus on practical exercises where each learning objective was broken down into a series of short tasks which could be completed in a basic way but also had scope to be expanded upon for those that found it easy. That way any students who found it easy could add extra details to their project while I was free to help those who were struggling. We also provided video recaps of each lesson to allow students to review everything at their own pace.

Technical details

The TechPixies site is built on Wordpress using the FoundationPress base theme, which I customised. It uses several industry-standard plugins including:

• WooCommerce
• LearnDash - provides the basis for all courses, but was substantially customised
• Gravity Forms
• Advanced Custom Fields

For the design of the site, I extrapolated brand guidelines from the logo and colours provided by the original designer.

The site uses Gutenberg, the page layout system from WordPress, which I integrated with the theme. This gives content editors much more design freedom and control, whilst ensuring they stay within brand guidelines.