Website proposal
A fast, self-owned website that puts your course dates, your fees and your results where teachers can actually find them, and that nobody can switch off but you.
“DELTA success without the stress.”
takeyourtimedelta.comFirst things first
You didn't plan to be shopping for a website this year. Let's make this the last time you have to.
Eight cohorts running across Module 1, Module 3 Specialism, Module 3 Management and Advanced Methodology. Nine months each, ninety-minute live sessions, a WhatsApp group, a pass guarantee, and results you're rightly proud of. That's a real business, not a side project.
Take Your Time DELTA has been running since 2021, and in that time you've built the two things that are hardest to build: a genuinely different course and a reputation among teachers who talk to each other. What you haven't had is a website that carries its share of the weight.
We went through takeyourtimedelta.com the way a teacher would: on a phone, at 9pm, deciding between you and The Distance Delta. Most of what a teacher needs is on the site somewhere. The problem is “somewhere”. Your eight course start dates live inside an FAQ. Your fees live inside the same FAQ. Applications hand people over to a Google Form. And underneath it all sits a WordPress install with ten plugins on shared hosting, which after this year you already know more about than you wanted to.
This proposal covers a rebuild: same content, same voice, same three brand colours out of that excellent snail-in-a-mortarboard logo. What changes is the foundation. A site with no database, no plugins and nothing to log into, hosted on Cloudflare's global network. A course calendar that is a proper page rather than a paragraph. An application that stays on your own site. And a blog you can post to as easily as you post to your own.
The code, the domain and the hosting account all end up in your name. If you ever want to walk away from us, you take the whole thing with you and it keeps working.
Your proposal fee is settled and we already have access to the domain and the hosting, so there's nothing left to arrange before we start. Say the word on what follows and we'll begin.
James Pitt
Founder, Blackoak Creative · Cwm, Blaenau Gwent
Where things stand
None of this is a criticism of the content. The writing is clear, and the FAQ is genuinely one of the best we've read. These are the things getting between it and the teachers looking for you.
Eight cohorts start this September, each with its own day and time, and the only place to find them is partway down the FAQ page. There's no dates page, no “next course starts” anywhere on the homepage, and nothing a teacher can share with a colleague or add to a calendar.
£640, £600 early bird, £560 for Advanced Methodology, all buried in the same place. Price is the second thing a teacher checks. Hiding it doesn't stop the comparison, it just moves it to a competitor's page.
The apply page hands people to a Google Form. It looks nothing like your brand, sends no branded confirmation, and leaves you copying answers out of a spreadsheet at exactly the point where a teacher has decided to trust you with nine months and £640.
The homepage ships 227 KB of HTML before a single image, then pulls in 67 more files: 267 KB of JavaScript and 218 KB of CSS. That's 43 separate script tags and 40 stylesheets to show six images and some text. jQuery is still loading, so is jQuery Migrate.
ElementsKit, Essential Addons, Premium Addons, Royal Addons and the Header & Footer plugin are all installed alongside Elementor itself. Every one of them loads its own CSS and JavaScript on every page, whether that page uses it or not. It's also five more things that need updating and can break.
The homepage title is just DELTA success without the stress, with no “Cambridge DELTA course” in it and no brand name. There's no course structured data anywhere on the site either, so Google can't list your cohorts the way it lists your competitors'.
The Advanced Methodology page carries the Module 1 description word for word: “DELTA Module 1 courses to support you to really learn what you're studying.” That's the sentence Google shows under it in search results.
One post, one category, published in July. Meanwhile your own blog has been running since 2010, is past a thousand posts, has nearly two thousand subscribers and has been a British Council featured blog. That's sixteen years of authority sitting next door, barely connected to the site that takes the bookings.
There isn't a single link to YouTube, LinkedIn or anywhere else in the site's header or footer. There's a page about the channel, but no link a visitor can spot in two seconds.
Your logo has three strong colours in it. The site sets its body text in plain Helvetica and takes its blue from the stock Astra theme rather than from the logo. It reads as “a WordPress site” before it reads as “Take Your Time DELTA”.
Measured on the live homepage, August 2026. The FAQ page is heavier still, at 263 KB of HTML.
The course pages, the FAQ, the testimonials, the pass guarantee, the eligibility criteria and the origin-story post are all written, and written well. This is a rehousing job, not a rewrite. Every existing address will redirect to its new home, so no link a former student has shared will break.
What we're building
We build it as a static site. Every page is worked out in advance and served as a finished file from Cloudflare's network, which has servers in London, Frankfurt, São Paulo and everywhere else your teachers are.
There's no database query, no PHP and no plugin waking up. The page is already built by the time the request arrives. Teachers on a phone in Vietnam or Brazil get the same site as someone in Reading on fibre.
There's no admin login on the live site and no database behind it, so the usual WordPress attack routes simply aren't there. No emergency plugin updates, no “your site has been suspended” email.
The blue, green and amber from your logo used properly across the whole site, with a typeface chosen for long-form reading. Fonts are served from your own domain, so nothing about your visitors is passed to Google.
A real course calendar, and the next start date visible on every course page. Prices stated plainly, with the early-bird deadline shown as a date rather than a paragraph of explanation.
You already write more than most agencies' clients ever will. You get a normal writing screen in the browser (headline, body, image, publish) and the site rebuilds itself within a minute.
Swap to privacy-first analytics that sets no cookies and stores no personal data, and load YouTube embeds only when clicked. In most cases that removes the legal need for the consent pop-up entirely.
Design concept
These are rough concepts, drawn to show the direction rather than the finished design. Your logo's blue, green and amber doing real work, and the two things a teacher came for (when does it start, what does it cost) visible without scrolling.
1 · Homepage
Take Your Time DELTANine months, not nine weeks. Cambridge DELTA Module 1, Module 3 and Advanced Methodology, at a pace that fits around a full teaching timetable.
TYTDNine months, not nine weeks.
● Next start: Mon 7 Sept
2 · Course dates & fees
TYTD| Course | Runs | Time (UK) | Fee | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Module 1 · Mondays | 7 Sept to 24 May | 19:00 to 20:30 21:00 your time | £640 | Apply |
| Module 1 · Fridays | 18 Sept to 28 May | 09:00 to 10:30 11:00 your time | £600early bird | 3 weeks left |
| M3 · Specialism · Sat | 19 Sept to 29 May | 09:30 to 11:00 11:30 your time | £640 | Waiting list |
| Adv. Methodology · Thu | 8 Oct to 24 June | 13:15 to 14:45 15:15 your time | £560 | Apply |
3 · A course page
TYTDNine months of exam preparation you can actually keep up with while teaching full time.
These are concepts, not the finished article. The typeface, the palette and the way the site talks are set out properly in the three sections that follow; all three are confirmed with you in week two, and two rounds of changes are built into the timeline. What we'd like you to judge now is the direction: your brand colours used properly, dates and fees on the surface instead of buried, an apply button on every course page, and your Trustpilot reviews and YouTube channel finally visible.
Design language · 01 · Typography
Your FAQ runs to thousands of words, and most of it gets read on a phone at the end of a working day. The current site sets all of that in the theme's default Helvetica. Changing the typeface is the cheapest, largest improvement available to us.
Now · Helvetica, inherited from the theme
DELTA success without the stress
Nine months, not nine weeks. Cambridge DELTA Module 1, Module 3 and Advanced Methodology, at a pace that fits around a full teaching timetable.
Nothing about it is wrong. Nothing about it is yours, either — it is the same typeface as several million other pages, and it was drawn for signage, not for nine paragraphs about assessment criteria.
Proposed · Newsreader with Source Sans 3
DELTA success without the stress
Nine months, not nine weeks. Cambridge DELTA Module 1, Module 3 and Advanced Methodology, at a pace that fits around a full teaching timetable.
Same words, same length, same screen. A serif with a bit of warmth in the headline, a workhorse sans underneath it doing the reading. It looks like a course rather than a product.
Three pairings to choose from
Newsreader for headings · Source Sans 3 for body, tables and buttons
An editorial serif drawn for screens, with a real italic worth using on testimonials and pull quotes. Source Sans 3 covers Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese, so every past student's name sets properly instead of falling back to a different font mid-sentence.
“I believe this is the correct way to do DELTA.”
Fraunces for headings · DM Sans for body, tables and buttons
Warmer and more characterful — Fraunces has a slight softness in the letterforms that suits “take your time”. It is the pairing this document is set in, so you have already read several thousand words of it and can judge how it wears.
“I believe this is the correct way to do DELTA.”
Literata for headings and long reads · Atkinson Hyperlegible for labels and forms
Literata was commissioned for reading books on screens. Atkinson Hyperlegible was drawn by the Braille Institute so that letters which usually get confused — capital I, lowercase l, the figure 1 — can't be. The most accessible of the three, and the least fashionable.
“I believe this is the correct way to do DELTA.”
The scale, shown at actual size
Design language · 02 · Colour
Your logo already contains the palette. What it has never had is a rule about when each colour is allowed to appear. Without one, everything drifts towards blue and nothing stands out — which is roughly where the site is now, using a blue that came from the Astra theme rather than from the snail.
That two per cent is the point. Amber works as the apply button precisely because there is almost none of it anywhere else.
Straight from the logo
The darker cuts, so the same colours can carry text
And the neutrals that carry 82% of the page
One amber element per screen. If two things on a page are urgent, neither of them is, and the apply button stops working.
It reaches 2.1:1, which fails the accessibility standard we're committing to. Amber is a background with near-black text on top of it, which reaches 7.8:1.
A green heading says nothing. A green pill says places are available. Green is reserved entirely for status, so it stays worth reading.
Every status pill carries a word as well as a colour, and links are underlined rather than merely blue. Around one man in twelve can't rely on the colour alone.
The whole system, on one row
Status, straight from the course calendar
In a sentence
Every pairing above has been checked against WCAG 2.2 AA and the ratio is printed on the swatch, so you can hold us to it at handover.
Design language · 03 · Language & tone
You've been writing for teachers since 2010 and you're past a thousand posts. We're not touching the voice. What's missing is a rule for the two hundred small fragments nobody plans: button labels, helper text, the message when an email address is mistyped, the first line of the confirmation email. Those get written by whoever builds the form, and that's how a site ends up sounding like two different people.
A good share of the teachers reading this are working in their second or third language. Short sentences, everyday words, one idea at a time. Anything that needs a run-up gets cut.
“Nine months.” “£640.” “Thirty sessions.” “Wednesday 2 June 2027.” Vagueness reads as evasion, and it reads that way fastest around money and dates.
Second person, contractions, no “we are pleased to announce”. The site should sound like the person who runs the WhatsApp group, because it is her.
DELTA is demanding and the site should say so plainly. “Take your time” only carries weight next to a straight account of the workload.
No “transform your career”, no manufactured countdowns, no capitals for emphasis. The only exclamation marks on the site belong to the people quoted in the testimonials.
“-ise” endings, “enrolment”, “programme”. One spelling of “Cambridge DELTA” everywhere, which happens to be what teachers type into Google as well.
The same idea, written two ways
The apply form, in your words
You can change this later. Applying doesn't commit you to anything.
We need an email address we can reach you on — this one looks unfinished.
Sandy reads every application herself, so it'll be her replying — usually within three working days.
The confirmation email, first four lines
Hello Priya,
Thanks for applying for the Monday Module 1 group, starting 7 September. Nothing is confirmed yet and you haven't paid anything — this is just me letting you know it arrived safely.
I read every application myself, so it'll be me getting back to you, usually within three working days. If a question occurs to you in the meantime, reply to this email and it comes straight to my inbox.
Sandy
Sent from your own domain through MailerLite, in the site's typeface and colours, rather than the Google Forms receipt teachers currently get.
House style, in one place
See all course dates, never Click here.Everything already on the site is yours and stays yours, kept word for word wherever you want it kept. We write only the genuinely new pieces — the dates page, the compare page, the Module 3: ELT Management page, and the form and email microcopy above — and you approve every line of it before it goes anywhere near the live site.
The centrepiece
You keep your cohorts in one simple list. Everything else on the site reads from it, so a date can never be right in one place and wrong in another.
courses.yml) or one screen in the admin; nothing else needs touching.Site structure
Everything currently on the site keeps a home. The difference is that a visitor can tell within one screen which of the three they're in: choosing a course, checking they qualify, or getting on with applying.
It's doing far too much work at the moment. It's holding your dates, your prices, your study-hours guidance and your deadline policy all at once. We lift the dates and fees out onto their own pages, then rebuild what's left as a searchable FAQ with proper question-and-answer markup, which is the format Google is most likely to feature directly in results.
Getting found
NILE, Bell, IH, ACE TEFL and The Distance Delta have been optimising these pages for years. You can't out-spend them, but you can out-specific them, because none of them offers a nine-month, low-stress course, and none of them has your pass rate or your reputation.
| What's wrong now | What we do about it |
|---|---|
Homepage title says nothing searchableDELTA success without the stress |
Rewrite every title around what teachers actually type: “Cambridge DELTA Module 1 course”, “DELTA preparation online”, “part-time DELTA”. Your tagline stays where it belongs, as the strapline it was written to be. |
| Advanced Methodology carries Module 1's description, live in Google today | A distinct, hand-written description for all seventeen pages. It's a twenty-minute fix that's currently costing you clicks on every Advanced Methodology impression. |
| No course structured data anywhere on the site | Full Course and CourseInstance markup generated from the calendar, plus FAQPage and Review. This is what makes a course eligible for Google's course listings. |
| Nothing targets the searches with real intent behind them | Pages built for “DELTA Module 1 course dates”, “how much does DELTA cost”, “DELTA while working full time”, “part-time DELTA UK”. Those are the questions your FAQ already answers better than anyone's. |
| Sixteen years of authority sitting on a different domain | A deliberate link plan between sandymillin.wordpress.com and takeyourtimedelta.com: the right posts pointing at the right course pages, and a clear route for your 1,900 subscribers to follow. |
| No way of knowing what's working | Google Search Console and privacy-first analytics set up on day one, in your account, with a plain-English monthly note from us on what people searched for and what they did next. |
After this year
You've already had one lesson in what it costs when the person holding the keys isn't you. Here's how we make sure that can't happen again, including if the problem turns out to be us.
takeyourtimedelta.com stays registered to you, in an account you control, with the login in your hands. We'll happily manage the DNS, but we never own the name.
Every file of the site sits in a GitHub account in your name. It's the whole site. No licensed theme to keep paying for, and no page-builder format that only one tool can open. Any competent developer can pick it up on day one.
Cloudflare Pages, set up in your own account, with us added as a collaborator you can remove with two clicks. We run it for you under the support year, but the account is yours. If we vanished tomorrow the site would carry on serving without anyone touching it.
Where everything lives, how to publish a post, how to add a cohort, who to contact for what. Written in plain English, kept up to date, and yours whether or not you stay with us afterwards.
Before we touch anything we take a full export of the current WordPress site (pages, posts, images and all) and give you a copy. Nothing is deleted anywhere until the new site is live, checked and signed off by you.
How the project runs
You're teaching thirty sessions a cohort across eight groups. The plan below keeps your share of the work small, and every step that needs you is scheduled rather than sprung on you.
A video call to go through the course range, the wording you want kept word-for-word, and anything the current site gets wrong. We export the whole WordPress site and map every existing address to its new one so nothing 404s later.
Homepage, a course page and the new course-dates page, designed properly in your logo's colours with a typeface picked for reading. You see real pages in a browser rather than flat pictures, and we build in two rounds of changes.
All seventeen pages built, the course calendar wired up and loaded with every 2026/27 cohort, the application form moved onto your own site, MailerLite reconnected, structured data added, and the blog set up so you can post without us.
A private preview link. Share it with as many past students as you like. We test on real phones, run accessibility checks against WCAG 2.2 AA, and clear the snag list before anyone else sees it.
The site goes live, every old address redirects, we point Search Console at the new sitemap, and we walk you through publishing a post and adding a cohort on a call we record for you. Then we watch the traffic closely for a fortnight in case anything needs nudging.
We already have access to the domain and to your hosting provider, so nothing is waiting on a login. The current site stays exactly as it is, live and untouched, until you've signed the new one off.
Next steps
You've already done the first part. The rest of it looks like this, so nothing lands on you as a surprise later.
Paid. It covered the audit you've just read, the concepts, and getting set up with your domain and hosting so we can move the moment you say go.
When you're happy with this proposal, the remainder of the invoice falls due and the six weeks start. Everything in this document is covered by it: design, build, migration, redirects, structured data and training.
It starts the day the new site is live and signed off, so you don't pay for hosting while we're still building. Includes hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and us on the end of an email.
If anything here needs changing, tell us before you approve it. That's what this stage is for. If it's right as it stands, approve it and settle the balance, and we'll book your kick-off call for the same week.