The brief was a marketplace, not a website: somewhere hair and beauty professionals buy CPD courses, work through lessons, pass assessments and walk away with a certificate that can be verified. Off-the-shelf course platforms exist, but they own your catalogue, your margins and your student relationships.
So the platform is custom: Stripe checkout and instructor payouts, a lesson player with progress tracking, server-marked assessments and certificates that anyone can verify — the pieces a training business actually runs on.
The catalogue is built the same way our marketing sites are: courses written as structured content in a build pipeline, exported and seeded into the app. Fifteen courses and 156 lessons at launch, each card showing hours, lessons, level and price — because a course site's job is to sell courses, not win design awards.
The look is the client's own — the cream and gold from her salon brand, and her preferred typeface — deliberately restrained so the courses do the talking.
- A full marketplace app — catalogue, course pages, checkout, student accounts and an instructor side with payouts
- Stripe payments both directions: student checkout in, instructor payouts out
- A lesson player with per-lesson progress rolling up to course completion
- Server-marked assessments and verifiable certificates — completion is checked, not self-declared
- Twenty-six database tables with row-level security on every one, so students, instructors and admin each see exactly their own slice
- A content pipeline that builds the course catalogue from structured source and seeds the app from it
- The client's own brand carried through — her colours, her typeface, course cards that lead with hours, level and price
An exact-match domain over a clever name
The platform is named for what buyers type, because marketplace discovery is search-led.
The clever brand names were all considered and all rejected. A course marketplace lives or dies on being found, and hairandbeautytraining.com starts every search one step ahead — the same naming logic as the lead-generation sites, applied to a product.
Certificates that verify, not decorate
Assessments are marked server-side and every certificate can be checked as genuine.
CPD only means something if the certificate does. A platform that hands out completion PDFs on scroll-to-the-bottom devalues every course on it; server-marked assessments protect the instructors' credibility as much as the students'.
Structured content, not a course editor
Courses are authored as structured source in a build pipeline and seeded into the app, not typed into an admin panel.
It's the same decision as our publishing builds: content as data survives redesigns, exports cleanly, and can be produced and reviewed with proper tooling instead of a browser textarea.