Retirement Reinvented

Built, not yet launched

A paid course area that only members can open, and a way for people to book time with her, both built inside the coaching website she already had.

Living by Design is a Rangiora coaching business with a retirement-transition programme that already existed in two parts: a published book and a workbook of 32 exercises. The third part, the guided digital version people pay for, is what Rune was engaged to build. The business is named here with written permission.

The constraint that shaped the job

She already had a website she pays for monthly, and no appetite for a second one. So the whole build sits inside her existing site, with nothing new to pay for. That saved moving everything across to a new site, which she did not need.

Before quoting, Rune went through what her existing website could actually do. Several things the client wanted turned out to be built in and switched off, which is the usual finding. Some things genuinely weren't possible, and Rune said so in writing before any money changed hands.

What is built and working

• 34 lessons across 8 modules, with 32 exercises. People type their answers on the page or print the lesson and write by hand. Nothing they type is sent anywhere.
• Answers that stay put. What someone types into an exercise is kept in their own browser, on their own phone or laptop, and is there again the next time they open that lesson. Every lesson has an "I've finished this lesson" tick, and the course home page shows how many lessons of each module are done. None of it is sent to the website, so nobody else can read their notes.
• A printable version of every lesson, made from the same text as the page so the two can't drift apart.
• A real lock on the lessons. Someone who has not paid cannot reach a lesson at all, not even by guessing the web address or looking behind the page at the code it is built from. Rune checked all 42 course pages and all 34 downloads while signed out. Every one refused. A lot of "members only" add-ons only hide the page, which means the lesson is still sitting there for anyone who knows where to look.
• Buying it works from start to finish. Rune bought the course the way a stranger would, with a real card. The payment went through, the site made the account, emailed a password, and opened the course. Nobody at the business had to do anything. The price itself is the client's decision, not Rune's.
• A home page for members that lists the eight modules, and buttons to move between lessons and modules, so nobody gets stuck after signing in.
• Paying up front for a one-to-one session, inside the hours she sets. Part of the original quote, not an extra. The checkout was tested with times the calendar would never offer, a weekend, an evening, a date months away, and it refused every one before asking for payment.

Trust what the system does, not what the company says about it. When the payment gateway closed mid-build

The thing that went wrong, and it wasn't the code

The payment gateway we'd agreed on stopped accepting new New Zealand signups partway through the build, after the company behind it was acquired. Their public announcements still said New Zealand was supported. What actually happened when the client tried to register was a redirect and a message saying the country wasn't ready yet.

Rune trusted what the system actually did over what the company said about it, told the client the same day, and moved the build to Stripe instead. It turned out there was already a verified Stripe account nobody had remembered, which removed the signup step entirely. Card payment is connected and live on the site now.

What testing the checkout turned up

Settings can look right and still be wrong, so Rune went through the checkout as a customer rather than reading the settings screens. That found a shipping bug on one of her products: the postage had been entered in two places during setup and the checkout was adding both. It was caught before anyone had bought one, fixed, and tested again with real items in a real basket.

The course was being charged postage too, for something that arrives by email. That is fixed. And bank transfer was the first payment choice offered, which would have broken the promise the course makes: a card payment opens the course in seconds, while a bank transfer sits unpaid until the owner notices it and approves it by hand. The course now takes cards only. Her book and her coaching sessions still take both.

The second job: a checkout with fewer steps

Once the course was built, the client asked for one more thing, quoted and invoiced on its own. Buying the course or booking a session on her site felt clunky, because every purchase asked for a postal address, and she only ever posts one thing: her book.

Rune rebuilt the checkout around that. Buying the course or booking a session is now one page: name, email, phone, pay. The book is the only product that still asks for an address and adds postage. A tick box on the same page lets people join her newsletter. Her booking pages open on a week of available times, the button says Book Now instead of Buy, and picking a time goes straight to the payment page. Her website had no setting for that last part, so it took a few lines of code, with a note beside them saying what they are for, so the next person who edits the site is not left guessing.

Going through it as a customer again turned up smaller things, all fixed the same day: prices cut off at the top of the page, two links that sent visitors into the website editor instead of her site, a Book Now button on her home page that opened an empty pop-up, and a page that said she only took bank transfer when she takes cards too. Card is now the first payment choice, so a session is paid the moment it is booked instead of waiting on a transfer.

Then the whole thing was bought for real: the course, a session and the book, with a real card where a card was involved. Every order, booking and email that a customer or the owner would get was checked, and the test orders were cleared out of her site afterwards.

Checking the words, not just the pages

Rune wasn't hired to check the writing. While putting 34 lessons on the site it checked the facts, quotes and links anyway, and gave the client a list of what it found. Where something looked wrong, Rune left it exactly as she wrote it and asked, because it is her book. Some of it was structural: one lesson tells the reader to assess six areas of their life, and the exercise that follows gives them eight. A lesson heading also had a typo in it, which matters more than it sounds: headings become page titles and web addresses, so that one would have gone live and been picked up by Google with the mistake in it.

Where it is up to

The course is built, the checkout has been rebuilt, and both have been bought for real to prove they work. The client is finishing her last two videos and doing a final read-through of the lessons. It goes public when she is happy with it.