MBTL Community
Year-round membership platform for a science conference
A year-round membership platform that carries the Microbiome Throughout Life conference beyond its three days, turning a once-a-year event into an always-on hub of curated research, talks and clinical insight for the microbiome field.
The Challenge
The Microbiome Throughout Life conference draws clinicians and researchers from across Europe, but its momentum evaporated the moment the event ended. PROevents needed a home that kept the audience engaged for the other 362 days of the year: a place to publish recordings, articles, podcasts and interviews, gate them behind a free account, and grow a membership base, without standing up a heavyweight LMS or renting an expensive SaaS community tool every month.
How I Built It
I designed and built the platform on WordPress with a custom Tailwind theme, so every section stays editable by the PROevents team and nothing depends on a page-builder licence. The information architecture leads with the science, a featured research feed and a six-format content library, then funnels visitors into a free account to unlock the full archive.
Custom Tailwind theme
A hand-built theme instead of a page builder: fast, dependency-free and fully editable by the client. The brand palette and the playful microbe-illustration system carry straight over from the conference identity for a seamless visual handoff.
Membership & gated content
A free account unlocks every webinar, recording, podcast and interview. Content is organised by format and topic so a member can jump from a conference talk to the paper behind it in a single click.
Performance & SEO
LiteSpeed caching, lazy-loaded media and a clean semantic structure keep the content-heavy library quick to load and easy to index, essential for a site that lives on discoverability.
Results That Matter
The conference now has a permanent address. PROevents can publish new talks and articles the week they happen, members get a steady stream of fresh material every month, and the brand stays in front of its audience all year instead of for three days in November.
What I Delivered
- Custom Tailwind (TailPress) WordPress theme
- Free-account membership & gated content library
- Six content formats: articles, interviews, podcasts, videos, webcasts, webinars
- Featured research & latest-news feed
- Conference-to-community brand continuity
- LiteSpeed caching & technical SEO
