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Naya Yoga & Pilates Website

 

Our client, Naya Yoga & Pilates, is a contemporary, ladies-only studio located in Motor City. They wanted a website that would express their aspiration to serve the vibrant and growing communities of Dubai with an inspiring space and professional fitness instructors. The client wanted the website to reflect Naya’s distinctive features and spirit.

Naya wanted to use their website to tell people about the studio and the available classes, to announce workshops and share the latest news, and to offer a user-friendly online system to register for classes and other events. The website also needed to have a section detailing the costs of various Yoga and Pilates sessions and classes.

The client wanted the site to be social-media friendly and accessible. The design of the website required to be representative of the Naya’s distinctive features as a Yoga and Pilates Studio, so we applied their brand guidelines and the visual style to address these requirements. The website also serves to inform about the upcoming workshops and the latest news from the studio, and for that purpose we added ‘What’s new’ section where information about the upcoming events should be updated regularly.

To address the need for the website to be social media friendly we integrated Naya’s social media links into the website.

 

Our solution

Our approach

 

To satisfy the client’s desire for the website to match Naya’s existing brand, we adopted their existing brand guidelines and visual style. We integrated Naya’s social-media links into the website, making it easy to flow from following the studio on services like Facebook or Twitter to visiting the site, and making it easy for a Naya client to post social-media comments or share news about Naya events. We built custom modules, as outlined below, for handling transactions. We provided the entire website in a package that is easy for the client to understand, maintain, and update.

 

Technology and tools used

 

We wanted to provide a site that would automate many functions and provide an editing interface for a staff that may be better with fitness than with technology, so we relied heavily on open-source tools, including:

• WordPress – to run the front-end website
• OpenERP – to run the class schedules, CRM and class booking.

We chose WordPress as our CMS platform for the following reasons:

• WordPress is modular platform that supports custom layouts.
• There are lots of reliable open source WordPress plug-ins available, and this allowed for faster development.
• We already have the technology to integrate OpenERP and WordPress.

We chose OpenERP because:

• It is a modular ERP/CRM system.
• It is easy to customize, and supports client-specific modules, workflows and reports.
• We have a great deal of experience in integrating OpenERP in various business applications.

Unified visual style

 

Naya Yoga & Pilates had already engaged talented graphical designers to create the brand guidelines and the visual style. To address the design requirements we used the Elegant Themes as a starting point and created a child theme that encapsulated the required style.

 

Building the bridge

 

Building the bridge between OpenERP and WordPress was the most difficult task in this project. We created a WordPress plug-in that allowed the website to read the schedule from OpenERP and display it as a weekly calendar. Users can browse the calendar, select the required event and register for the event. The website then transfers the registration to OpenERP for further handling.

 

OpenERP customization

 

To address the client’s requirements for online registration, membership maintenance, class and event booking and payment, we customized OpenERP’s existing “Event” and “Membership” modules. In addition, we built a module to manage “Tickets”. The site visitor can purchase an individual ticket for a class, or a bundle of tickets. One ticket grants access to one session. The scheduling system we built uses the tickets in association with the existing event registration to track the events each site user can participate in, and to let the client track how many people have registered for each event.