The Alternative Story
The Alternative Story teaches English to primary and secondary students across four Singapore centres, and its old site couldn't keep up with a growing timetable. We built a WordPress site the team schedules and edits itself.
A Beaver Builder site on WordPress with programmes, branches and classes held as structured data, so The Alternative Story's team updates its timetable by import and runs the site without a developer.
What we were solving
The Alternative Story is an English tuition centre in Singapore. It teaches primary and secondary students from four branches and online, and it has a point of view: children can do well in exams and still enjoy learning. Parents arrive with a specific question. Which class, at which branch, on which day, for which level?
The old site couldn't answer that quickly. Programme information was scattered, the timetable was hard to read and harder to update, and every change went through a developer. The marketing and IT teams wanted to run the site themselves: update schedules, post articles, publish testimonials, add a branch when one opened.
They also had a clear picture of how the new site should look. By the time development started, the team had laid out their own page designs in Canva. Our job was to turn those layouts into a working WordPress site without losing the structure a parent needs to find a class.
How we tackled it
Programmes and schedules as data, not pages
Programmes, branches, team members and testimonials became custom post types with Advanced Custom Fields. The class schedule is the heart of it. Each class is a record with a level, a branch, a day and a time, and the public schedule page uses Search & Filter Pro so a parent can narrow a long timetable down to the few slots that fit. Because the schedule is data, a new term is an import, not an afternoon of editing tables. We set up WP All Import so the team uploads a spreadsheet and the schedule rebuilds itself.
Their designs, our build
The team supplied page layouts in Canva. We reviewed them, wrote a development brief, and built the site on Beaver Builder with a child theme so every layout stays editable. Where a layout would have broken on a phone or buried a call to action, we said so and adjusted it with them. Google reviews pull in by branch, enquiry forms land in the team's inbox and mailing list, and a downloads area gives parents resources without a login.
A launch around the client's hosting
The centre hosts with a Singapore provider that had no staging option. We built on our own staging server, trained the team over two recorded sessions, moved the site across and worked through the provider's support queue until it ran cleanly. The site went live at the end of March 2023. The domain transfer followed later, so launch day didn't depend on it.
What we delivered
The Alternative Story now runs its own website. The team updates class schedules by import, publishes articles and parent testimonials, and has added branch pages as the centre has grown. Three years on, the site is still the Beaver Builder build we launched, now carrying four branches and online classes. The centre has been on our Website Care plan since launch, and in 2026 we migrated the site to WP Engine hosting with a full post-migration check.
What we learned
A client who brings their own designs still needs a structure underneath them. The Canva layouts told us what the pages should look like. The custom post types and the schedule import are what made the site something the team could run. We'd scope that structure first again.
When the client's hosting is fixed, test it in month one. The provider's lack of a staging option cost us a week at the end of the project. A single test upload at the start would have shown it.
