Full-Stack Developer / Strategy & Branding
2015-2026OTPBooks.com
A decade running the digital storefront for On Target Publications, with WooCommerce built out into a full digital-delivery platform with streaming, a customer library dashboard, and a pandemic-era book lending feature.
→ My longest-running client relationship, a platform built from scratch in 2015 that still sells, streams, and lends their entire catalog today.
The problem
On Target Publications works with leading minds in the fitness, strength & conditioning, and medical worlds to produce continuing education for fitness professionals, strength coaches, and clinicians. Their catalog isn’t just paperbacks: it’s book PDFs, audiobooks, and video lectures.
That makes their store a harder problem than it looks. WooCommerce handles “sell a file download” out of the box, but OTP needed a real digital library: customers who buy a video lecture should be able to stream it, not just download it; audiobooks and ebooks should live somewhere customers can always come back to; and the purchase experience should feel like theirs, not like a default WooCommerce theme.
The approach
I built otpbooks.com from scratch in 2015 (custom WordPress theme, WooCommerce underneath, with personalized layouts for products, cart, and checkout rather than stock templates) and I’ve developed and maintained it ever since.
The center of the platform is the digital delivery dashboard: a customer-facing library where everything you’ve purchased lives. From there, customers download their PDFs and audiobooks, and stream the video lectures, audio, and books directly in the browser. A set of custom plugins extends WooCommerce to power it.
My role also ran wider than the code. I was responsible for strategy and branding on the site, overseeing the work of the UI/UX designer and acting as the bridge between designer and client: translating the owner’s goals into design direction, and design decisions back into buildable, sellable pages.
The feature I’m most fond of came during the pandemic. With people stuck at home and many out of work, the owner wanted to give them a free way to keep learning. I built a borrowing system on top of the existing library: the owner marks any book as borrowable, the product page grows a “Borrow now” button, and when a logged-in user clicks it, the book lands in their digital delivery dashboard, on the same shelf as their purchases, at no cost.
The outcome
OTP is my oldest client: the relationship started in 2015 and is still active a decade later, which is its own kind of outcome. The platform has sold and delivered their catalog through every format shift along the way, the streaming library means a purchase is permanent access rather than a one-time download, and the borrow feature let the owner turn the store into something generous when it mattered.