Georgia Burnett followed her passion and after ten years of taking classes herself she opened Broad Street Bellydance in March of 2014. What started as a small room in the back of a Spartanburg gym grew into a full blown dance studio on Main Street in Downtown Spartanburg. With the support of mentors and her husband, Georgia has expanded her curriculum this year to include not only her own belly dance classes but has welcomed instructors teaching everything from Hula Hoop to Hawaiian Hula, Bollywood and Salsa. Her vision for an all inclusive, safe place for women to feel comfortable in their own skin has become a reality.

“Our mission is to introduce the art of belly dance to Spartanburg. We also use that platform to promote positive body image, self acceptance, self esteem and self confidence in women.”

The Project Scope

Logo Design

Georgia originally came to me to rename and rebrand Broad Street after closing on a Main Street location. She named the studio after her daughter, Bella, and wanted the custom hand drawn illustration gifted to her by a friend incorporated in the logo. The design had to project professionalism as well as an all-inclusive, welcoming and multi-cultural environment.

In addition to the logo, I created a custom seamless background for her to use in print and web applications. The Moroccan themed background was designed to be screened back in order to overlay text.

The logo was handed over to a local sign shop where her outdoor signage was created using vinyl with an acrylic overlay that gives her logo a polished, three dimensional appearance.

Print Design

Business cards and flyers were created as part of her branding package and I provided her with a flyer template so that she could create her own flyers without having to get in touch with me.

WordPress Website Development

Georgia had some specific needs when it came to the website. I was there every step to help her figure it out and get her a website that would serve her in three ways: 1) as a way to inform potential clients about her services, 2) to give class notes and other student resources a place to live in order to help her spend less time distributing information and 3) integrate her class scheduling platform, PunchPass, into her website in order to make registration and purchase of classes as simple as possible.

The first step was a new web design and sitemap. In order to best organize all of Georgia’s information, we needed to really look at the structure of pages and content. Knowing what information she wanted to share and how she wanted to present it was super important in the design process.

Second, I started diving into the construction of page layout, navigation and templates. This part of the process also included figuring out the password protection feature. Georgia needed a student’s area that was only accessible via password. That’s not a standard function of WordPress so that process had to be vetted and tested until we had what we wanted.

Third, content creation and organization. She had specific information that had to be organized into categories. She was constantly having to field questions from students regarding class notes, lost info, etc. This student’s area would make it easy for her students to log in and access class and choreography notes, class schedules and video tutorials both past and present.

Fourth, the integration of PunchPass. This platform offers fitness class instructors a way to easily create class registrations, collect payment and keep attendance. They had a relatively simple process to integrate their browser based application into WordPress and other websites via iframes and straight forward external links. We were able to simply share her class schedules as a list or calendar. We also created attractive pages where new students could purchase and register for classes.

You can read Georgia’s thoughts on her experience here.