In the past few years, the online learning market has risen at a tremendous pace. According to a Forbes report, the market is projected to reach $325B in size by the year 2025. This is almost triple of what it used to be a couple of years ago. Implying, educational websites are not only relevant right now, but they’ll also be in the near future. Therefore, creating an online educational website can be a highly profitable way to make money online.
Stunning educational websites are usually multifunctional – they host self-learning courses, contain learning resources, provide information about syllabuses and much more. But how to build an educational website that will thrive? Hold the line. We’ll take you through all the things that you need to take care of.
How to set up an educational website?
Before you start building any type of WordPress website, there are three important things that you need to do – choose an appropriate domain name, choose a reliable web hosting provider, and install the WordPress software.
When it comes to web hosting, always choose a service provider that offers all you need to build a stunning and highly functional website – trusted website uptime, fast and reliable performance, 24/7 customer support and the ability to handle sudden or steady growth. Bluehost offers all of these along with an all-in-one dashboard, a variety of themes, plugins and tools, and affordable prices.
Once you’ve chosen your domain name and web hosting provider, and installed WordPress software, you are all ready to customize your website as per your preferences.
In this article, we will focus on finding the right theme for your educational website and the right plugins that will enable you to build online courses.
Step 1 – Finding the perfect educational theme
When creating an educational website, choosing the right WordPress theme with the key features that will enable you to set up the complex website with ease is important.
The education website design isn’t just about the look, but even about feeling and the overall user experience. Some of the main features that may help you with understanding the tendencies of educational websites are:
- Appearance
The layout, images, colors, and fonts used for creating educational websites should be considered while building the website as they largely contribute towards creating the overall user impression.
- Authentication profile and page
It is essential to provide the users with an authentication process (phone number/email + password combination). The profiles of students and teachers should vary and have different features. While the students would need a complete list of active/completed courses, and information about points/credits/certificates, the teachers would need an information page about the list of added courses besides other details.
- Dashboard
The dashboard is a workspace for the teachers and students, where they can track the progress of courses and get feedback. Through a dashboard, students can check the number of enrolled courses, the number of available hours, etc., and teachers can check the added courses, track ratings and their earnings.
- Navigation
The basic and most important form of navigation on your website is the main menu found in the header. It should be simple with only the necessary options. Moreover, it should include clear call-to-action buttons to the website navigation, particularly on the pages such as ‘Apply and See Courses/Programs’.
- The right message
Every educational website is created for conveying the right message to visitors. People want to ensure that the educational website is reliable and meets their expectations fully. When it comes to creating the best brand and image, a website with an appropriate theme is very important.
- Mobile version
It is a very important feature and shouldn’t be ignored. The website needs to have a responsive design so that parents, teachers, and students can easily visit it on their gadgets at any time.
Step 2: Select the right plugin to set up online courses
When you create an educational WordPress website selling online courses, integrating any educational plugin can be helpful. However, in the succeeding sections, we will focus on two of the many widely preferred plugins – one premium and one free.
1. LearnPress (Free)
If you are on a budget, LearnPress is the way to go. It enables you to set up a robust system for supporting efficient management of students and online courses.
Some of its principal features are listed below:
- Create and manage various online courses
- Charge for admission through different payment methods
- Manage and communicate with your students properly
- Add more features through add-ons
Well, it is clear that it offers more than enough features to get the job done. The noteworthy thing about LearnPress is that it enables you to set up an educational website on a budget, and then allows you to extend the capabilities through add-ons and extensions down the line.
2. CoursePress Pro (Premium)
CoursePress Pro is a part of the repertoire of plugins that comes with WPMU membership. This powerful plugin enables you to set up the courses for your WordPress educational website and even charge for admission.
In a nutshell, CoursePress Pro enables you to:
- Set up online courses
- Charge for the courses using upto 17 different payment processors
- Add interactive learning features like quizzes
- Enable students to submit the coursework for review
- Integrate WooCommerce
Put simply, CoursePress Pro is one of the best options available if you are looking to set up paid online courses. Furthermore, you get access to the reliable support team of WRMU DEV, which is worth the price of the plugin.
Are you ready?
If you run an educational institution that doesn’t have an online presence yet, taking that first step can be daunting. However, there are plenty of platforms and tools that can make the process simpler. And as you must’ve figured out by now, WordPress is one of the best ones for most institutions as it is free and open-source, easy to install, supports various media types, and allows you to scale up your website at any time with plugins and tools. And service providers like Bluehost make it even more convenient by providing powerful WordPress Hosting which comes with a free domain for 1 year, a free SSL certificate, caching and CDN, 24/7 support and more.
