Web Developer Mentor · Open Study · Student Deliverable Review · OpenClassrooms
Work with Clients' Needs —
OpenClassrooms Open Study
Facilitated a live Open Study session for OpenClassrooms students working through a client-facing web development project — reviewing student deliverables, providing structured feedback on WordPress theme choices and design decisions, and guiding live Q&A.
The Session
Students presenting real client work
OpenClassrooms' "Open Study" format brings students and their mentor together live to review real project deliverables. This session covered two client-facing projects: Project 2, building a WordPress site for a client, and Project 3, building a film festival website — both requiring students to go beyond technical execution into understanding and serving a client's actual business needs.
For the WordPress project, students submitted PDF documentation showing how to manage the site — covering CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) through the WordPress dashboard — along with screenshots of admin accounts, theme selection rationale, and the CSS customizations they made. I walked through two exemplary student submissions live, pointing out what made them effective and what every student should include in their own documentation.
By 2020, I had been a Web Developer Mentor at OpenClassrooms for about a year and a half, working with students across the full stack, front end, and web developer paths. This session represented one of the more advanced milestones: where students had to defend not just their code, but their thinking about the client.
Open
Study
OpenClassrooms
Web Developer Mentor
Work with Clients' Needs
Live Deliverable Review · 2020
The Work
What the Open Study session involved
A structured live review where students presented client project deliverables and received direct mentor feedback on their decisions.
Deliverable Review
Reviewed each student's project submission live — theme selection documentation, design rationale PDFs, and locally-hosted WordPress builds — evaluating how well their decisions addressed the client brief.
WordPress Project Feedback
Gave direct feedback on theme choices, layout decisions, and client alignment — including a chalet rental/sales site and an outdoor film festival website, each representing a distinct client context.
Design Rationale Discussion
Pushed students to articulate why they made each choice, not just what they built — connecting theme features like WooCommerce support or hero image design back to specific client requirements.
Live Q&A Facilitation
Facilitated open Q&A after each student presentation — surfacing questions from the group, addressing common misconceptions, and turning individual feedback into shared learning moments.
Client Needs Analysis
Helped students think through how to analyze a client's business context — who their audience is, what the site needs to accomplish, and how design and technical choices either serve or undermine those goals.
Research Guidance
Guided students through researching their client's industry — including looking at comparable real-world sites like FilmFreeway to understand how professional platforms in the same space approach design.
In the Session
Reviewing student deliverables live
Each student opened their deliverable live — a PDF documenting their theme choice and rationale, alongside a locally-hosted WordPress build they had developed. The review wasn't just about whether the site looked good; it was about whether the student could explain why their choices served the client.
The two deliverables in this session showed the range of client contexts students navigate: a chalet rental and sales business needing e-commerce functionality, and an outdoor film festival needing to convey atmosphere and drive registrations. Each required different design thinking, different theme features, and a different understanding of what the client's audience needed at first glance.
The quotes above are drawn directly from the students' own deliverable documentation — their words, making the case for their decisions. My role was to probe, affirm where the reasoning held, and redirect where it didn't.
Deliverable 1 — Chalet Rental Website
Theme: Elixar (WordPress)
"A creative and flexible WordPress theme, well suited for business, portfolio, digital agency and product showcasing — with WooCommerce support for showcasing different chalets for sale and rent."
Deliverable 2 — Film Festival Website
Watch It Outside — Boston Edition
"The design has a large banner at the top with a typical view of what an outdoor film festival looks like in the evening, giving the visitor a clear at first glance of what the sitting arrangement and experience would look like."
Advice from the Session
Practical guidance shared with students
Beyond reviewing deliverables, the session included direct practical advice to help students avoid common mistakes and get the most out of the project:
Check that your WordPress theme is editable before committing to it.
Some themes lock the CSS file. Students who discovered this mid-project had to start over. Verify you can edit the theme's template files and CSS before building.
Ask your mentor for the mentor guide.
Each project has a mentor guide with rubric-aligned checklists that directly map to how the project reviewer will evaluate your work. If your mentor hasn't shared it, ask.
Watch the OpenClassrooms classes — they contain what you need to pass.
The project requirements are answered in the course material. Read between the lines and apply what the class teaches directly to the deliverables.
Use Chrome DevTools to reverse engineer inspiration sites.
Can't figure out how a film festival site achieved a specific layout? Right-click, inspect, and toggle CSS rules to understand how it was built — then bring that understanding to your own project.
Session Recording
Watch the Open Study
Sample recording of the live Open Study session — "Work with Clients' Needs" — OpenClassrooms, 2020.
Reflection
Teaching students to think like client partners
The jump from "I built this" to "I built this because the client needs X" is one of the most important transitions a junior developer makes. Technical execution is learnable from documentation; understanding what a client actually needs — and making decisions that serve that need — requires a different kind of thinking entirely.
Open Study sessions like this one are where that thinking gets practiced out loud. Students have to defend their choices in real time, in front of peers, with a mentor who is going to ask why. That pressure is productive — it mirrors the reality of client-facing work and builds the habit of connecting every decision back to the brief.
Web Developer Mentor, OpenClassrooms Open Study — Work with Clients' Needs, 2020.
2020
OpenClassrooms
Web Developer Mentor
Open Study · Deliverable Review
Work with Clients' Needs
Interested in working together?
I'm open to remote opportunities in instructional design and technical learning experience design.