Ecology in Classrooms & Outdoors

We built Teach ECO (teach.ecologyoutdoors.org) as a standalone WordPress resource library on a subdomain of ECO’s existing Squarespace marketing site. The architecture was deliberate: ECO’s main site handles organizational marketing, program overviews, team bios, and donor engagement — things Squarespace does well. But the resource library needed membership gating, subscription tiers, structured lesson content, and a filterable card-based interface — capabilities Squarespace can’t handle natively. We built the resource library on WordPress with a membership and subscription system supporting both free and paid tiers. Free ecology lessons (22+ and growing, available in English and Spanish) are accessible to anyone. Premium content — including comprehensive K–5 Place-Based Units — is gated behind a paid membership. Each lesson lives on its own detail page with structured content (materials, setup instructions, learning objectives, downloadable resources), and the library homepage displays lessons as a filterable card grid so educators can browse by topic, grade level, or interest. Navigation integrates seamlessly between the Squarespace parent site and the WordPress resource library, so visitors move between them without realizing they’ve crossed platforms.

We host teach.ecologyoutdoors.org on managed WordPress infrastructure tuned for a membership-based content platform with subscriber authentication, downloadable resources, and a growing lesson library. The hosting plan includes performance optimization (caching with proper exclusions for logged-in members and gated content), daily backups, security hardening (firewall, malware scanning, timely WordPress and plugin updates), 24/7 monitoring, and direct support from our team. The arrangement ensures that when an Oregon educator logs in to access lesson materials before class, the site is reliably fast and available — exactly the kind of infrastructure invisible to users but essential for a resource that teachers depend on.