about  lcbt_

The London College of Beauty Therapy (LCBT) was founded in 1995 and is one of the largest funded specialist college of its kind. Courses in Beauty Therapy, Hair & Media Make-up, Hairdressing, Fitness, Digital Marketing, Health & Childcare and Advanced Aesthetics start all year round with a range of flexible dates and times to meet your needs!

why wirebox?_

LCBT current website was in WordPress which was developed over 5 years ago.

The site used a lot of plugins to work which included woocommerce, form builders and submission course enquiries to their external database system.

The site became bulky and slowed downed access to the students.

LCBT wanted a design refresh as well as a platform to be fast and built for the future to interact with their course systems API.

LCBT contacted Wirebox based on our experience and integrations into external systems.

our approach_

Wirebox needed to design a solution that would be user friendly, intuitive to the users of the system. It needed to be simple to use and engaging, to promote and encourage the system to be used at all times. The solution also had to integrate with a 3rd Party course system, to allow the feed of data seamlessly into the system.

Within 3 weeks Wirebox:

• Developed a Prototype (aka Wireframe) to allow LCBT team to visualise the site.
• Develop new designs with updated UX/UI for each page.
• Developed a new architecture for a WordPress and Laravel system to work together.

outcome_

Developed a WordPress site alongside a Laravel system to manage course enquiries.

The Laravel system would post the information to the course system via an API. Doing it through Laravel was easier and more manageable than WordPress to do this. It also allows updates to WordPress not to affect the integration.

Laravel a PHP framework was built to complete tasks like sending data from forms into databases or APIs. Whereas WordPress was not built to do this, but it is possible. We have found using hybrid models like this, makes it easier to have the benefits of WordPress and a framework like Laravel.

The new LCBT website was received well and gave LCBT a platform to build upon in the future and offer their students more.