WordPress
Combining course delivery, event management, and paid enrollment into one coherent site meant a national sports governing body needed a learning platform built well beyond what WordPress does out of the box. Ollon developed the WordPress environment end to end, selecting LearnDash for course delivery and Events Manager alongside WooCommerce for enrollment, then built custom plugins and a custom theme for workflows those tools didn't cover on their own. Ongoing plugin maintenance included version upgrades and a PHP major version upgrade across the whole site, plus vulnerability investigations when specific plugins raised concerns. That foundation is what let a learning management system live inside what started as a standard content site.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Tracking exactly which questions a user answered in which course meant more than WordPress's own data could offer, since that level of detail belonged in the CRM other teams at the organization already relied on. Ollon built custom RESTful APIs for bidirectional synchronization with Dynamics 365, mirroring new courses created in WordPress into custom Dynamics entities and syncing progress, completions, and certification status back and forth in real time. That two way sync meant course data on the website and course data used internally in Dynamics never drifted out of sync. The integration turned a public facing course site into a source of the same detailed usage data the organization's CRM team could act on directly.
SSO Integration
Users needed one identity across multiple websites built in different technologies, instead of a separate login for each one. Ollon implemented Azure AD B2C using OAuth2 authorization flows, with JWT tokens managing user sessions and Bearer token authentication securing the service to service communication between WordPress and the Dynamics backend. That authentication layer supported thousands of concurrent users during high traffic course launches without becoming the bottleneck itself. Single sign on meant a user's identity carried across every property in the organization's application ecosystem, not just the one they happened to land on first.
Migration to Azure
A new course opening drew far more visitors than a national sports governing body's original WPEngine hosting could handle, and the site degraded badly during the exact high visibility moment it needed to perform. Ollon investigated hosting alternatives and moved the application to Azure, chosen because the organization already hosted other applications there. Performance bottlenecks found during testing got fixed before the next major course launch. The next comparable marketing event went out with the site holding up under the same kind of traffic that had overwhelmed it before.
Automated testing
Manual testing alone was not going to catch every regression across a site handling course content, payments, event registration, and CRM sync all at once. Ollon built a Cypress based automated test suite that ran as a final check before anything reached the live environment, covering the site's core functional flows instead of just the pages most likely to be touched by a given change. That automated coverage meant a change to one part of the site got checked against the rest of it automatically. Automated testing became a standing part of the release process instead of a manual step someone could accidentally skip under deadline pressure.
Load testing
Traffic during a major course launch could spike far beyond a national sports governing body's normal daily usage, and the only way to know whether the infrastructure could handle that spike was to simulate it before it happened live. Ollon built K6 based load testing scripts to simulate that traffic pattern, running multiple rounds of tests and setting up dedicated metrics specifically to monitor how the system behaved under simulated load. Each round of testing surfaced specific performance bottlenecks fixed before the next test. That iterative load testing is what let the platform handle thousands of concurrent users during real launches without repeating the outage that first made load testing necessary.
UI/UX design and prototyping
Before any code was written for a national sports governing body's new online course offering, the organization's marketing team needed to see and approve what the experience would actually look like. Ollon built wireframes and visual designs in Figma covering the site's main features, giving marketing stakeholders something concrete to react to instead of a written description of planned functionality. That prototyping process went through multiple rounds of collaborative revision with the organization's own team before anything was finalized. Design approval happened before development started.
Technical architecture
While the visual design for a national sports governing body's new course platform was being finalized, the organization's IT department needed its own confidence that the underlying system would actually work, not just look right. Ollon produced technical architecture diagrams alongside the visual design work, laying out how the database was structured and how it communicated with the frontend. Those diagrams gave IT enough specific detail to approve moving forward on their own terms, separate from the marketing team's visual sign off. Two different stakeholder groups each got the kind of documentation that actually mattered to their part of the approval process.
Knowledge transfer, training, and documentation
Managing day to day content changes without calling Ollon every time meant a national sports governing body's own staff needed documentation, and the technical side needed it too for whoever picked up maintenance work later. Ollon supplied technical documentation covering the site's infrastructure and code, plus non technical documentation walking through the WordPress admin panel for the organization's own content team. That documentation gets updated continuously as new features ship, including a changelog maintained after every deployment. New team members on either side, technical or content focused, have an actual reference instead of having to ask around.
Managed Services and Application Monitoring
Keeping a course platform patched, supported, and responsive to marketing's ongoing requests didn't justify a dedicated internal team for a site that only runs a handful of major events per year. Ollon provides a flexible monthly allotment of support hours, scaling up or shifting between months depending on what a given season needs, covering patching, support requests, and minor changes, plus dedicated monitoring metrics that track how the site performs under load during major events. That combination of flexible hours and event specific monitoring is what let a small ongoing team keep a high stakes seasonal platform running reliably.
Data visualization
Google Analytics data and Dynamics CRM data told two different halves of the same story about how people were using a national sports governing body's online courses, and neither system alone gave a complete picture. Ollon built Power BI reports that combined data from both sources, letting the organization see analytics and CRM data together instead of switching between two separate tools to piece the picture together manually. That combined reporting meant marketing could see the full usage picture in one place. The dashboards turned two disconnected data sets into one usable view of how people actually engaged with the courses.
Cross-browser and device compatibility testing
Bugs that only showed up in one specific browser were exactly the kind of issue a course platform could not afford during a high visibility launch, since visitors arrive on whatever browser they already have open. Ollon built cross browser test coverage into the Cypress suite, running the full merged test set across multiple browsers including Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, and fixing browser specific bugs like login race conditions that only appeared on certain engines. That testing caught issues real visitors would have hit, not just problems visible in whichever browser development happened to use by default. The site held up consistently across the actual mix of browsers people were using to access it.
Data and Analytics
Understanding not just how many people visited a national sports governing body's course pages but which specific questions each user got right or wrong meant Google Analytics alone was never going to be enough. Ollon layered custom tracking on top of standard Google Analytics tagging specifically for course usage, while the Dynamics integration tracked user level detail down to which questions were answered in which courses. That granular tracking gave the organization the ability to fine tune targeting and understand its audience at a level standard web analytics never would have surfaced. The combination of page level analytics and question level course data is what let marketing actually understand behavior, not just traffic.
Azure DevOps
Every code change reaching a WordPress environment hosted on Azure needed a reliable path from the git repository to the live hosting environment, not a manual file copy someone had to remember to run. Ollon built a CI/CD pipeline through Azure DevOps that automated moving files from the repo into the Azure hosted environment, then extended it to run the Cypress test suite automatically as part of each deployment. Setting up the service connections and managed identities Azure required meant the pipeline could authenticate securely without hardcoded credentials in the configuration. That automated pipeline let deployments happen reliably every time.
Azure
Surviving traffic spikes meant a learning platform's Azure environment had to be more than compute and storage, it needed the specific services that supported security and scale directly. Ollon provisioned that environment using Terraform, incorporating Azure Key Vault for secrets management and Azure Functions for background processing alongside the core App Services, database, and storage hosting the platform. Infrastructure defined as code meant the environment could be reviewed and reproduced deliberately. That Azure foundation gave the platform the security and scalability the organization's traffic patterns actually demanded.
Project management
Two separate stakeholder groups, marketing and IT, each needed their own deliverables tracked and approved before any major feature on a national sports governing body's course platform could move forward. Ollon created a project plan for every significant feature, including the initial launch, specifically to surface foreseeable issues before development began rather than during it. Meeting cadence flexed with the actual workload, daily internal standups and weekly client syncs during active development, dropping to weekly overall during maintenance, then increasing again around major launches. That structure meant both stakeholder groups got what they specifically needed without either one being managed as an afterthought to the other.
Website analytics and SEO
Standard Google Analytics tagging told a national sports governing body how many people visited its course pages, but not what those visitors actually did once they got there. Ollon added custom tagging on top of the standard Google Analytics plugin specifically to capture engagement with the online courses, giving the organization visibility beyond simple page view counts. That custom tagging fed directly into the combined reporting built later, so page level behavior and course level usage lived in the same analytics picture instead of separate tools. The result was analytics detailed enough to actually inform how courses got promoted and adjusted, not just a visitor count on a dashboard.
WooCommerce
Selling access to paid online courses meant WooCommerce needed configuring for something more specific than a typical product catalog. Ollon built custom checkout flow changes and product page styling for course purchases, including custom minimum purchase rules for group seat increases WooCommerce didn't support by default. That customization meant the payment experience matched how course enrollment actually worked. Customers could purchase and enroll in a course through the same flow, without the payment system treating it like a physical product being shipped.
