LS Business Management

LS Business Management is a bilingual, Portuguese-first consulting brand led by an operator with a real track record: fifteen years at McDonald’s, structuring the Chiquinho Sorvetes franchise network from 49 to more than 150 units, and rebuilding from scratch after emigrating to the US. The expertise was never the problem. The website described a service, when the business needed a machine that turns a stranger into a qualified lead while he sleeps.

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The brief

The rebuild had to sell an ecosystem rather than a service, on three pillars: Content, Method, Implementation. The book is the entry point, the RUMOS method the core asset, a paid diagnostic session the primary conversion. The objectives:

• A new custom theme across the site, keeping the existing domain and hosting.
• Anonymous traffic converted into qualified, tagged, nurtured leads automatically.
• A premium visual identity, no template look, no stock imagery.
• Everything client-editable in WordPress and scalable for future products.

The live site is lsbusinessusa.com, built to the same standard I hold on every custom website build I take on.

The Digital Diagnostic: the part that does the selling

The centerpiece is a free Digital Diagnostic. A visitor answers 25 questions across the five areas of the RUMOS method, five statements per area, each rated 1 to 5. It scores each area separately for a total between 25 and 125, identifies the strongest and most critical area automatically, and returns a written interpretation based on the band the score lands in.

For the visitor it is a useful free assessment. For the business it is the qualification step: someone who has just rated their own operation and read a result on their weakest area is a very different prospect from an anonymous page view, and the system already knows what worries them. Three decisions matter:

• It is built custom, not bought. There is no paid quiz plugin. Questions and result copy live in an editable config, so the diagnostic can be reworded or rescored without a vendor’s interface or a monthly fee.
• No lead is lost. Form fields and results are written to a dedicated database table, wp_lsb_diag_leads, before anything else happens. If a downstream service fails, the lead is still on the client’s own server.
• The visitor gets the result immediately. An on-screen result is followed by a result email through wp_mail, with dataLayer events on start and completion so drop-off inside the tool is measurable.

The build

Theme and design system

The site is a custom Full-Site-Editing child theme with YITH Wonder as the parent. No page builder. The visual language lives in theme.json as design tokens: a locked palette on navy #12203A and bronze #C07840 with supporting tones, an 8-point spacing scale, a serif and sans pairing. A color or spacing change is one edit that cascades site-wide.

Every section is a reusable block pattern: hero, three-pillar grid, RUMOS letter-rail, product ladder, FAQ. They are baked into page content, so the client edits them in the standard WordPress block editor, not a proprietary tool. The signature R-U-M-O-S letter-rail is one responsive pattern shared across pages.

Accessibility sits in the tokens: 4.5:1 contrast targets, focus rings, 44px tap targets, reduced-motion support. Fonts are self-hosted through Bunny Fonts instead of Google’s CDN, for a faster first paint and no third-party font requests.

Structure and workflow

Seven pages map to the funnel: Home, About, The Book, The RUMOS Method, Products and Implementation, Contact, Diagnostic. Slugs are clean Portuguese (/sobre, /livro, /metodo-rumos, /diagnostico), with 301 redirects from the old English ones.

All development happened on a staging clone; production was never edited directly. The loop: back up, build on staging, verify by rendered output, tag the release in Git, plan the cutover. Every significant change is committed and tagged, so any state is revertible.

Lead routing and tracking

The diagnostic, contact form, and book waitlist push subscribers to MailerLite through its API, tagged by critical area, score band, country, business status, and traffic source across 23 groups plus custom fields. Entry into a group triggers a five-email Portuguese nurture sequence running day 1 to day 15, in the brand’s voice. If the API call fails, the lead is still saved locally and the error logged, and the result screen never blocks on a third-party outage.

GA4 is wired into the theme with a dataLayer to gtag bridge mapping six conversion events (diagnostic_click, book_interest, whatsapp_click, contact_submit, diag_digital_start, diag_digital_complete), de-duplicated so each fires exactly once. Google Tag Manager is in place, with a Meta Pixel slot prepared.

Each page carries a unique title, meta description, and H1, plus friendly URLs, JSON-LD for Person, Book, FAQ, and Organization, and Open Graph tags so links shared on WhatsApp and social render as rich previews.

The MailerLite API token was never committed or exposed. It lives in a git-ignored env file, is installed as a wp-config constant, and is referenced from there. It is in no theme file and no repo.

Problems diagnosed and solved

Problem	Cause and fix
Pages served stale or wrong-language content	Host-level Endurance Page Cache was serving cached snapshots at the proxy, masking updates. I scripted cache-level toggling and programmatic purges, verifying by rendered output (x-proxy-cache: MISS) rather than an HTTP 200.
Logo rendering as a white box or collapsing	SVG logos collapsed with no intrinsic dimensions, and a mis-labelled asset showed a white background on the navy header. I identified the correct asset variant, added SVG upload support via upload_mimes filters, and constrained logo sizing in CSS with a fallback.
MailerLite group API blocked with HTTP 403	The shared host IP was rejected by MailerLite’s /groups endpoint. I pre-created the 23 groups from an unrestricted IP and seeded a persisted group-ID map, making the live call a no-op. Subscriber and field calls were unaffected.
Email domain authentication for deliverability	I added DKIM (CNAME), SPF, and verification (TXT) records to the live DNS zone through cPanel’s zone-edit API over SSH, with explicit single-SPF merge logic to avoid duplicate SPF records, then verified propagation across public resolvers.
Invisible headings on light sections	A global white-heading rule made headings invisible on cream backgrounds. I fixed it at source in theme.json so headings inherit section color, plus a CSS safety net scoped to light-background blocks.

Stack

Layer	Technology
CMS	WordPress (Full-Site-Editing block theme)
Theme	Custom child theme (parent YITH Wonder), block patterns, theme.json design tokens
Front-end	Native Gutenberg blocks, CSS custom properties, self-hosted fonts (Playfair Display + Inter)
Interactive tool	Custom PHP and JS assessment engine, custom database table for lead storage
Marketing automation	MailerLite API (subscribers, custom fields, groups, nurture workflow)
Analytics	GA4 (direct gtag), dataLayer event layer, Google Tag Manager
SEO	Yoast, JSON-LD (Person / Book / FAQ / Organization), Open Graph
Infra	HostGator (Apache), SSH, WP-CLI, cPanel DNS API, Git tagged releases, bash deploy scripts
Localization	TranslatePress, Portuguese (pt-BR) as sole published locale

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