The school
The Aziz School of Magick teaches shamanic healing through courses, workshops and a monthly membership. It has been running for years, with about 100 courses and workshops and a student body spread across the world. The founder teaches. A small team runs the rest.
The situation
The school was moving from an old website-based course system to a new platform. The move had stalled. Of the people who needed their access carried over, only a fraction had been moved, and every student in between was a support email waiting to happen.
I took over the move on a Sunday. Before touching anything, I audited what was there.
Payments
The new membership signup form was still in test mode. Every payment through it failed.
Tracking
The site's analytics had recorded nothing since March. The tag was broken. It looked like a traffic drop and it was not.
Email
The domain carried three conflicting sender records, which makes mailbox providers distrust every email the school sends.
Server
A 6 GB error log, five forgotten export folders and years of leftovers had filled the hosting and slowed the site.
Identity
Many students had one email in the old system and another in the new one. Moved carelessly, they would have lost courses they paid for.
The fix
- The move. Nearly 900 students and members carried over with the right access to each of about 100 courses and workshops. Eight unclear cases were held for the team to decide by hand.
- Silent on purpose. The move was built so that no student received an automatic email by accident. The school chose the moment and the words for its own relaunch message.
- One person, one record. Students with two emails were matched and given the full set of what they had bought.
- The old address. The old school pages now send every visitor straight to the new portal.
- Legal pages. Terms, privacy and refund pages rewritten for how the school sells today.
- The server. Site files cut from 60 GB to 21 GB and the database from 908 MB to 255 MB, with a backup taken first.
Five days
I started on 27 September. The move was complete and checked on 1 October. The school's relaunch emails went out the next day.
The platform was never the real problem. Students paying and not getting access is an automation problem, and it follows a school from platform to platform until somebody builds that part properly.
What this shows
This is what the full audit and fix looks like in practice. I look at everything before I change anything, I fix the things that are costing money or trust right now, and the team gets a written list of what is still open and who decides it.
The team kept teaching and answering students the whole time.