iThemes Training is Becoming Solid Academy

I first met Nathan Ingram at a WordCamp. He was so geniune and smart and knew his stuff – he made a great first impression. Later, I learned that he heads up this thing called “iThemes Training”. Little did I know that he, and I, and iThemes would converge one day.

Several years later I joined the StellarWP team and got asked to work on iThemes with Devin Walker. One of the first things I wanted to do was get to know Nathan better and understand iThemes Training more. As I dug in, I was continually amazed at the depth and breadth of this fabulous online community.

Earlier this year, I reached out to Nathan to talk about how iThemes was becoming SolidWP. He saw the vision quickly and was immediately all in and excited – I really love that about Nathan, his excitement is raw and infectious. We thought a great first step towards becoming SolidWP would be to go straight to the iThemes Training community with the news and get their input and feedback. What a great ride that was!

The question next became… how do we handle transitioning iThemes Training in this whole rebrand process?

Ebooks, Tutorials, and Webinars… oh my!

While I was pondering the future of Training with Nathan, Dan Knauss, Sarah Ulmer and others on the Marketing team, I was also reflecting on the huge library of free resources that iThemes had curated and published over the years.

Did you know that iThemes has published 58 eBooks? Some available on Amazon.com! They cover a wide range of topics, from web agency best practices, to SEO tips and resources, to burn out and entreprenurialism. It’s a huge array of 100% free resources.

Did you also know that if you Google “What is WordPress” that an iThemes tutorial is one of the top results? It’s a huge driver of traffic for the iThemes website.

The great thing about all these resources is that there’s so many of them. But the downside, is that for visitors to the website it’s really hard to navigate and find the one thing you’re looking for. And truth be told – we want visitors to find our products first and foremost.

Developing a Marketing Strategy for Solid Academy

So … this is “rebrand in public”, and we’re supposed to be sharing our insights and amazing ideas to how we are doing this, right? Well, I wish I could give you a template or a roadmap to how to develop a pivoting marketing strategy for 10 years of webinar content.

What I can tell you is what I did, and it’s not revolutionary. Here’s the one word that drove all of the strategy for Solid Academy: Navigation.

I was working on the Sitemap and main navigation and was frustrated with the user journey it was creating. Where were we leading our visitors? Why are there so many different types of free content? What do visitors remember about this site when they go away?

So I focused on the Sitemap and what I wanted it to look like. Here’s a preview – notice the “Academy” root menu item specifically.

So the idea is that all of the various educational resources that iThemes has published over the year belong within “Solid Academy”.

We’re currently working on republishing many of these resources already to be “Solid Guides” and “Solid Tutorials”.

Nathan Ingram and the Solid Academy Logo

Last but not least, Solid Academy is going to have it’s own logo. I thought it would be fun to walk through all of this and reveal some options with Nathan together. Check out the video below and let us know in the comments on YouTube which logo version you prefer