Overview
Daniel Tudorache is one of Romania's top tennis strength & conditioning coaches, with 25+ years of experience and serious results — he works with junior talents, professional players, and other coaches across Romania and internationally. For this project, we built two connected properties: a live bilingual brand and authority site at danieltudorache.ro, and a fully custom Next.js training platform at app.danieltudorache.ro — the latter currently in final development, with launch planned shortly. Marketing site and product, side by side, designed as one experience.
The Challenge
Daniel's audience is three audiences at once. Parents of junior players want reassurance and real results before investing in their kid's development. Professional athletes want expertise, discretion, and a direct relationship with a coach who understands high-performance tennis. Other S&C coaches and physical preparators want methods they can learn from and credentials they can trust. Each group asks different questions and responds to different signals — and a generic undifferentiated site would lose all three.
Meanwhile, the training programmes themselves — the actual product Daniel wanted to sell — couldn't live on a WordPress plugin. They needed real authentication with OAuth, a proper database for programme structure and user progress, Stripe integration for payments, HD video delivery, member dashboards, and bilingual parity from the first click to the last. A content site could not do this. A product had to be built.
The Approach
We separated the work into two properly-scoped properties that function as one ecosystem.
Marketing site → WordPress, because the client needed a familiar editorial interface. A heavily customised WordPress build where Daniel and his team can update content — seminars, testimonials, media appearances, blog posts, programme information — without touching design or layout. Five distinct audience funnels (Online Programs, Personal Training, Juniors, Professional Players, Physical Preparators) each with their own entry point and their own messaging, sharing a single consistent visual identity. Bilingual Romanian / English throughout.
Training platform → Next.js, because it's a real product. A fully custom Next.js application built from scratch. Not a WordPress plugin pretending to be a SaaS — a production-grade product engineered with proper authentication, a real database, OAuth integration, Stripe payments, and a structured content model for programmes, workouts, and user progress. This is the layer that delivers the actual training to paying members.
The two properties share visual identity, brand voice, and user context — so a prospect landing on danieltudorache.ro from Google and clicking through to the platform feels one continuous experience.
The Solution
On the marketing site (danieltudorache.ro — live)
- Five dedicated audience funnels — Online Programs, Personal Training, Juniors, Professional Players, Physical Preparators — each with its own page, messaging, and CTAs, sharing a consistent visual identity
- Animated rotating headlines in the hero
- Real player testimonials with portrait photography of professional tennis players
- Custom "Noir" display typeface paired with Poppins — a premium sports editorial feel
- Bilingual RO / EN content with TranslatePress — URL-level language routing, proper hreflang signals
- Seminar documentation — four training stages with dedicated galleries
- Sports Metrics / Metrologie Sportivă section — Daniel's performance testing work
- Media appearances gallery under the About section
- Structured blog with article schema
- Schema.org Person / Organization / Article markup for rich search results
- LiteSpeed Cache and intersection-observer animations for performance
On the training platform (app.danieltudorache.ro — in final development)
This is where the real engineering lives.
- Next.js — fully custom application, server + client components, locale-based routing for EN / RO, built from a blank file
- Real database — structured data model for users, programmes, workouts, user progress, payment history
- OAuth authentication — secure login with industry-standard protocols
- Stripe integration — subscription and payment handling, multiple payment methods
- Member dashboard — weekly schedule, workout completion tracking, progress indicators
- HD video training library — programmes organised by week and phase, each workout with equipment lists, form tips, common mistakes, age adaptations, and intensity guides
- Programme catalogue — organised into clear training categories with focused monthly spotlights
- Sport science tools — purpose-built calculators that Daniel actually uses with his athletes (heart rate zones, one-rep-max estimation, pace splits)
- Interactive coach biography as an onboarding experience
- Legal pages (Privacy, Terms, Refund policy)
- Full bilingual parity — every page, every button, every calculator, in both Romanian and English
Key Moments
The decision to separate site and product
The easy path for this project would have been to cram the product into the marketing site with a WordPress membership plugin. We explicitly didn't. Membership plugins are fragile, they don't scale, and they tie the product forever to WordPress update cycles. A real product deserves real engineering, and that means a dedicated Next.js application with its own database, its own authentication layer, and its own deployment. Two separate properties, one coherent brand.
The audience funnels as the core IA
Most personal-brand sites try to speak to every visitor with the same homepage. Daniel's site does the opposite — the first major decision a visitor makes is who they are. Junior player's parent? Click here. Professional athlete? Different page. Another S&C coach looking for methods? Third page. Each funnel is tuned to that audience's questions, concerns, and vocabulary. It's more work to build than a single homepage, and it converts dramatically better for complex personal-brand audiences.
Bilingual from the ground up, both sides
Bilingual is easy to get wrong. We made sure both properties ship with proper language parity from day one: the marketing site uses TranslatePress with URL-level routing and hreflang, and the Next.js platform handles EN / RO natively with locale-based routing at the framework level. There is no "machine-translated afterthought" feeling anywhere. A Romanian-speaking user and an English-speaking user get the exact same experience, exactly the same quality.
Why Next.js, not WordPress, for the product
We didn't pick Next.js because it's trendy. We picked it because the product has real requirements — user accounts, database relations, secure authentication, Stripe webhooks, video delivery, structured programme data, progress tracking — that WordPress cannot handle cleanly without turning into a plugin nightmare. Next.js gives us the flexibility to design the data model properly, the performance to deliver video smoothly, and the maintainability to keep the product running for years without the weekly WordPress plugin update dance.
The Stack
Marketing site (live):
WordPress · Custom theme with TranslatePress (RO / EN)
Custom "Noir" display typeface + Poppins
LiteSpeed Cache · Intersection Observer animations
Schema.org (Person, Organization, Article)
Training platform (in final development):
Next.js · React · Server + client components
Real database · OAuth authentication · Stripe payments
Locale-based routing (EN / RO) · HD video delivery
Custom sport science calculators
Member dashboard with progress tracking
The Result
The marketing site is live and actively maintained by the client. The training platform is in final development and scheduled to launch shortly — the engineering is complete, final content and QA are in progress. This is the project we point to when a prospect asks whether we can handle serious product work: it has every piece a real SaaS needs, built from scratch, with no shortcuts and no plugins standing in for custom code.
