Danielle Valens
Line of Work
Pilates Teacher & Instructor
Web Address
Danielle’s Gifts
Danielle is a Pilates teacher and has been teaching mat and equipment classes for the past 10 years. She lovse Pilates and feel really lucky to be able to share her knowledge and passion with her clients. This year she decided to move her business online enabling her to reach out to a wider audience.
Key outcomes
Danielle was initially nervous about spending the money for the course, but working with Vicky eliminated the legwork and time it would have taken her to dig around and find solutions herself. She found that being able to ask an expert about the little glitches that came up was well worth the cost of the course.
Having the course broken down week by week made it really accessible. Concepts she wouldn’t have thought about, such as colour schemes, were laid out for her so that she had a comprehensive and coherent plan before she started to build. This structure saved her time and frustration in the long run, since she was able to execute logically on her ideas rather than plunging in blindly.
Danielle liked the timing of the course. Eight weeks seemed like a realistic timeframe to build a functional website and the thought of having a finished product in just 8 weeks felt really good after months of procrastination. Once she enrolled, she knew she just had to show up and do the work, and at the end of it she would have a new website that she could easily update as needed.
“It’s always a very calming thing to have someone who knows what they’re talking about when it comes to web development and Vicky definitely knows WordPress.”
It has opened up a whole new avenue of opportunities and ideas and directions to go into.”
Summary
Danielle is a Pilates teacher who knew she needed to replace the dated and buggy site she had built some years back. While Danielle shines in the presence of her students, she didn’t feel nearly as confident building a website.
She needed a mix of structured guidance to help her with the technical aspects as well as a warm and authentic mentor to give her the confidence boost she needed to market the site.
Challenge
Danielle had a site she did not like.
It looked archaic, it was difficult to update, and it was not created with a coherent plan in mind.
She couldn’t find the motivation to build a new site, even though she knew she desperately needed one, because she wasn’t sure where to start.
Seeing the task on her to-do list each month was stressful, as was looking at the beautiful sites of her competitors and peers and comparing them against her own.
Lockdown in March 2020 made it even more vital to get her website online and bring some of her classes online.
This was a whole new world, and she knew that she would need someone to guide her through the tools that she could use to make this as straightforward as possible, both for her and her clients.
Solution
After hearing Vicky speak to a group, Danielle learned about Rock That Website and signed up to start the next day.
She wanted to be led through the process of building a website step by step, and this 8 week course offered exactly that.
Because of her struggles maintaining her current site, she also needed to know she could get her questions answered, as well as reassurance that the final outcome would be one that she could confidently manage without help.
Outcome
Perfect Poise Pilates now has a site that Danielle is happy to promote!
She found that having someone to answer questions and give feedback, either Vicky or a peer in the course community, was so helpful. Danielle learned a number of new tools to streamline common tasks like resizing images, creating graphics, and marketing the website.
Before the course, she didn’t realise that creating a website is so much more than building the site itself! She learned to consider design, copy, and promotion as part of her website plan.
Danielle has greatly benefitted from the lifetime resources she now has access to, so she can learn more about marketing and promoting her site. She has a new circle of people that she wouldn’t have known to follow for advice before, as well as more confidence in her ability to execute what she learns.
I feel much more confident in terms of how to engage and interact with people. My message is now crystal clear. You learn a bit of marketing, you learn a bit of PR, you learn a bit of social media skills. You learned the design and programming parts of it. You really learn so many different avenues. I’m no longer scared by the technical bits. It doesn’t freak me out in a cold sweat.”
