Create an Online Course Website

this week we’ll be showing you how to
create a good lesson plan and set up
your lesson content online so easily
that before you know it you’ll be
launching your very own online course
website I honestly couldn’t begin
guessing the number of community members
who have told us how they wanted to
teach an online course or have always
wondered about becoming a web creating
guru themselves someday whether your
goal in sharing your knowledge is to
promote your skills and services or
perhaps to monetize your years of
valuable experience and expertise
this week we’re showing you just how
easily you can achieve that goal now I’m
sure you’re eager to get started
designing and building pages for your
online course but having a great website
is one thing having a great course is
quite another and as everything else
we’ve looked at in these master classes
the best way to approach a task and see
great results is to begin with thorough
preparation and planning
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the first thing that we want to do is
set time aside in our calendar to work
on our course we need to determine how
long we want to spend on research and
planning writing and recording and we
also need to set a deadline for when we
will launch our course this is to keep
us focused and time efficient we can
also make our research and planning
stage more efficient by breaking it down
into segments beginning with interests
speak to clients and colleagues about
what they are interested in learning
visit community news feeds and learn
what they are most interested in or
passionate about by now you’ve probably
already acquired plenty of skills while
working on elements or and WordPress
sites that other web creators are
interested in learning there are plenty
of related topics such as SEO
copywriting caching site performance Web
Design and so on and as professionals
we’re always looking to learn something
that will improve our own skills now
once we have a basic idea for our course
we should ask friends and colleagues
even past clients what they think about
a course on this subject is it something
that they would like to learn do they
know of other people who might be
interested would they consider paying to
learn these things how much should we
charge for such a course the goal of any
Content that we create is to draw the
attention of clients or prospective
clients we usually succeed in doing this
by striking a chord with a topic that
interests them so make this one your
primary factor when you decide on your
course topics the second thing we should
be researching are of course keywords
having found the best keywords for your
subject use them to phrase the title of
your course tags and the descriptions
keyword research will give you
tremendous insight for example which of
these two cause titles do you think
would rank better in search results how
to master Adobe Photoshop or Adobe
Photoshop 101 they might seem as though
there’s very little difference but that
difference translates into
search ranking being on the top or on
the bottom of the pile a great way to do
our research is to look to our
competitors knowing what the competition
is doing will help us avoid similar
mistakes and perhaps even do something
that they hadn’t thought of check out
their courses are they doing the same
content that we want to offer how can we
make our content even better and what
can we offer our students to give them
better value now this will not only help
to inspire us but it will help us to
understand the competitive landscape of
what alternative options exist for our
perspective students now obviously the
best thing any tutor could offer their
students is practicality bottom line
will our course provide practical skills
that students could begin applying the
moment they complete the course now once
we’ve identified the practical skills
that we’re providing we should make sure
to highlight them throughout the course
description prospective students will
look for courses with actionable
outcomes so make it easy for them to
find those outcomes when they read about
it in your course
with a good sense of what our
perspective students are interested in
and how to help them find what they’re
looking for it’s time to plan our course
a simple way to approach this planning
stage is through following the a B C
beginning with a for actualize and
outline we should be creating an outline
for every form of content that we
provide because it helps us stay focused
on the goal of that content but by
actualizing our outline we’re adding
practical value to our lessons and so
while course overall so think of it as a
well thought-out workflow answer B begin
with the basics and build up each lesson
until you reach the goal C keep it
coherent and linear because this makes
the context logical and easier to
remember going forward then backtracking
to prepare something else for the next
step is just complicated and very
confusing
a great way to see what a well-planned
outline looks like is by going to places
like Amazon there we could browse the
table of contents of the best-selling
books and videos on similar subjects to
see what material they cover and in what
order with our outline perfected we can
flesh out our lessons and obviously this
may also require some additional
research and study on our part some
great places to look for the kind of
material that will inspire our students
our professional blogs and forums other
online courses or better yet through
conversations with community members and
fellow web creators once we’re finished
creating our lessons we’ll move on to
creating the place where these lessons
will appear our very own online course
website
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we’re going to upload and setup the
lessons and the content for our online
course to an existing site in three
simple steps now as some of you already
know elemental recently released a brand
new template kit purposely designed to
provide a simple means for users to set
up and manage a complete and dedicated
website for online courses now a great
thing about template kits is that we can
just pick and choose the templates that
we want to use which is great for us
here since we’re adding our course to
our existing site and we’ll go right
ahead and do that now beginning with
step number one will install the
templates that we need from this
template kit the same way as we would
any other template now on the WordPress
dashboard we’ll go to pages and add a
new page to our site now this page that
we’re creating will serve as a place to
introduce visitors to the course so
we’ll name this page course and will
click on edit with elemental in
elemental will open the templates
library obviously will have to be
connected to our elements or account to
be able to access the library we’ll
search for online course and from the
results we’ll select this template right
here for a courses page and click insert
to add it to our new page like all of
our templates you can add or remove
widgets and use the options in the style
tabs of the widgets themselves to design
it the way you would like to see it when
we’re done we’ll click here to save our
draft and move on to step number two and
focus on the lessons themselves the
content that is essential to our purpose
the way that the online course template
works is by utilizing the advantages of
WordPress as a content management
platform to organize posts and archives
so we’ll be creating each lesson as a
separate post and then those posts are
going to be archived together as a
course now we’ll also be using word
presses category option to create
dynamic links to our lessons or posts
and we’ll do that right now by going to
the posts tab on the dashboard and
select categories and here we’ll set up
each lesson as a category we’ll
basically just copy/paste the title of
each lesson from the
lesson plan that we created earlier and
as you can see the course that we’re
using for this demonstration only has
three lessons but you can have as many
as you need with the categories set we
can create our lessons and add content
the same way as we would any other post
we’ll add a new post give it a title
assign it to the category of the same
name then we’ll copy and paste the text
and the images we should also add an
excerpt and tags while we here when
we’re done we’ll click on save draft
because it’s always better to be safe
than sorry now there are a couple of
things that we could do to make our
course look even more professional it’s
considered good practice as well as good
incentive for students to set up a
timing system and monitor time
management for our lessons we could add
some custom dynamic fields to our post
pages showing the estimated time it
should take a student to complete each
lesson and to do this we’ll click on
these three dots or menu icon in the top
right hand corner we’ll go down to the
bottom of this menu and click on options
and then make sure that the custom
fields option is selected now we may
have to reload the page for this change
to take effect so if you haven’t saved
your draft do that first
now that the custom fields option is
accessible we’ll click here on enter new
so that we can create a completely new
field with a new name and we’ll call it
estimated time to complete lesson now
this is just a label for us to
understand what this is and we’ll also
add the value of this particular lesson
let’s estimate it as being 25 minutes
and we’ll click on add custom field and
it’s done another thing that we could do
to spruce up our lesson pages is to move
on to step number three and design a
cool template for our lessons now while
we’re already here on WordPress
dashboard we’ll go into the templates
tab and with theme builder selected
we’ll go to set up a template for our
lesson post the same way as we would any
other type of post we’ll add new select
single then select post as our type of
single asset we’ll name it
lesson and click on create template now
we can skip this and go straight on to
the elements or editor to create a
design from
scratch or we could use the options here
in the library and save ourselves a lot
of time just by searching for the course
single post or single lesson template
from the kit that we’ve already borrowed
from and as you can see we have two
almost identical templates now the
difference is this button right here
this template serves as a template for
the last lesson of the course with this
button placed here for the student to
click on which could be either linked to
a pop-up or a page to congratulate our
students upon finishing the course we
could also use this buttons dynamic
links to register the students as having
completed the course
personally I don’t honestly feel that we
need this year as we’re creating a
course as simply as possible so I’ll
just select this simple template and
we’ll click insert and use it for all of
our lessons now while we here we can add
a few extra elements such as the
estimated time field that we created
earlier to do that we’ll go to the
widget library and search for the post
info widget then we’ll drag and place it
on our page then with the widget
selected we’ll return to the editor
panel and in the content tab we’ll
delete all of the superfluous fields
we’ll leave just one and click on it to
access the options we’ll change the
field type to custom then just beneath
that we’ll click on this icon here to
access the dynamic tags and from the
menu we’ll select the post custom field
and with the post custom field linked
we’ll click on it again to access its
settings and select our estimated time
field in the key option if we want to we
can also go to the Advanced section and
add a label to appear before the field
estimated time to complete this lesson
and like everything else we can go into
the style tab and set the typography and
the color of the field any way we wish
now once we’re happy with our template
design we’ll publish it and set the
conditions to appear according to
specific categories which in our case
are also specific lessons this way we
set this template to appear with all of
the lessons and click Save now I’ll go
to one of my posts and check that
everything is OK and as you can see our
content is nestled nicely within our
single post or should I say single
lesson template now I’d like to go to
our course page because I’d like to show
you a quick way to link up our lessons
now as you can see we have a nice toggle
widget where we can list all of our
lessons and all we need to do is select
the widget and on the editor panel in
the content tab we’ll edit the text to
suit our lessons and to link each
section of the toggle to our actual
lesson we’ll just add some text begin
this lesson and use the hyper text
options to turn the text into a
hyperlink we’ll click on the settings or
link options and here we’ll select the
appropriate lesson from the list and
click update and we’ll repeat this for
the rest of our lessons alternatively we
could just as easily create a menu back
on the wordpress dashboard by going to
the appearance tab and selecting menus
and there in the dialog box create a
menu using the categories option thus
creating a lesson menu that we can link
to a navigation or nav menu widget on
our course page
now with our lessons set up online and
our website organized the next step is
monetization while this is an optional
step for some for many others especially
as we see our way through the covert 19
crisis monetizing their course online is
crucial
either way it’s a very simple step the
simplest way to monetize your content
that we could recommend is by creating a
pop-up in the element or theme builder
now in practice this pop-up can serve to
block content from view only granting
access to viewers who have paid for a
subscription to your content now as you
can see the template kit doesn’t include
a payment system where you can charge
users for the course this requires a
professional purpose-built learning
management system or LMS plugin if once
you’ve completed setting up your website
you prefer to monetize your online
course using an LMS there are some great
tools out there among them we would
highly recommend lifter LMS learn – or
member press these will also help you to
manage the financial transactions
involved in course enrollment this week
we looked at online courses not just a
what makes a course great but also how
to set up our very own online course and
recommending ways that you could use to
monetize it now this masterclass is one
of several that we’ve produced over the
past eight weeks to help small
businesses and self-employed
professionals in our community to get
ahead rather than lose out as we all see
our way through this crisis as best we
can
and we sincerely hope that you find that
this in our previous master classes
helped in bringing you a whole new world
of business opportunities and ready and
if you have any tips and advice that
could help other users plan and set up
and monetize their online courses or
other valued content then please add
them in the comments below and if you
have any criticisms we are equally
interested in your feedback and if
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Cheers