AB Educate sells courses to current and prospective California tax preparers. The State requires all tax preparers to complete a certification course, receive a certificate to document their status to clients and be registered in the CTEC database. Today, more than 30 years after its founding, AB Educate is one of California’s top providers of these CTEC certification courses.
The Perils of Custom Coding
Originally named A&B Office, the company has been creating and running courses for Tax Preparers for a long time – so long, in fact, that when they started, no standardized website tools like WordPress were available to simplify creating a complex website. As a result, they hired a programmer to build a custom website using Microsoft’s ASP.NET platform.
The custom site worked well enough to support their early growth. However, over time, it began to slow down, and customers began experiencing crashes and other issues. When they turned to the original developer for help, A&B discovered they were no longer findable. Compounding the problem, the programmer did a poor job of commenting within his code and hadn’t left a current backup. A&B was in trouble.
Overcoming the Hurdle of Missing Source Code
With the original programmer gone and no current backup code available, A&B needed to find a developer capable of helping them fix the performance issues that their users were experiencing. They turned to their IT services provider, also a West Hills Web client, for recommendations and guidance. The IT provider knew we thrive on technical websites and databases and suggested they contact us for help. We dug into the problem and resolved the issue. Over the next year, we handled a variety of other tweaks for them.
Time for a New Website
The lack of the current source code limited our ability to provide much more than text changes. A&B needed a new website built on a universally accepted and maintainable platform like WordPress in order to avoid another situation where one and only one person could support their business website.
A&B had reservations about building a new website because of the anticipated complexity of anyone else working with the CTEC integration requirements. However, after seeing what we could do, they engaged us to replace their custom website with a modern, mobile-friendly, and flexible alternative.
Customization that Doesn’t Hamper Future Change
We used WordPress as the foundational platform, LearnDash as the Learning Management System (LMS) needs, and WooCommerce to manage the sales aspects of the new A&B website.
Updating the CTEC system, managing the number of student retakes, and issuing certificates meant the new site would have some customization. We provided all required integration and functionality by building extensions for LearnDash and linkages between it and WooCommerce, and it was all done to modern coding standards within the WordPress framework.
Rebranding an Established Business
Before the new website’s launch, we began a discussion about rebranding A&B Office and giving it a new name that was more in line with its mission to educate and certify tax preparers and other professionals.
Through a series of marketing meetings, we helped the company to settle on a new name that would evoke the trustworthiness of the A&B Office brand, but more accurately communicate the company’s educational mission. It was then that the new AB Educate brand was born.
Along with the new name we developed a logo for the new brand that also gave a nod to the older brand’s logo.
How Did We Do?
AB Educate is thrilled with its new website because it retains the crucial CTEC integration, maintains the data for thousands of students, and provides a functional, flexible, mobile-friendly website to support their business for years. And because it’s built on WordPress, they can update most of the site all on their own.
As Andres & Alvaro Saavedra, co-owners of AB Educate, say,
“We chose West Hills Web because they proved their abilities over a year of helping us manage our old custom-coded site. We are thrilled with the job they did, especially with the CTEC integration and retention of our large student database. We look forward to working together for years to come.”
– Andres & Alvaro Saavedra, co-owners of AB Educate
