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While you may be an expert in your field, you’ll need more than depth of topic knowledge, valuable learning content, and a great teaching style to give your audience the best online learning experience. A great example of an online course also delivers a stimulating visual experience.
Here’s why branding matters for your online course platform, how to choose a template for your online course website, and how to brand your course on social media.
Why is a visual identity important for online courses?
There are a lot of potential learners looking for online courses. That means there’s also a lot of potential competition for the best online course. To make your own online course more attractive to and engaging for your target audience, it’s important to make them visually appealing and easy to navigate and use.
Look up some online course examples and you’ll see that the best online course creators effectively organize their course content. Clearly labeled chapters and lesson titles, URL slugs, and content metadata, for example, will help site visitors easily find the content they’re looking for and help your search engine optimization (SEO). That way, someone can find what they need whether they’re searching on-site as a current customer or with a search engine while trying to find the right e-learning course for them.
The visual consistency of your course content also helps to shape your brand and unify your course chapters. That includes filming locations and your background, but also can be as simple as keeping the fonts and graphic design consistent across your course materials, website, email list, and digital marketing.
The way a course is structured within a website is also key to engaging potential learners and maintaining the interest of active users. Compartmentalizing your content into course lessons and chapters, resource types (e.g., video, audio, and downloadable materials or tutorials, webinars, and classes), and levels (e.g., beginner, intermediate, and advanced) will help to drive traffic to the right pages of your site. This means that more people will find what they’re looking for once they’re on your website.
How to choose a template for your online course
It’s important to understand that different website templates will work for different types of online business and courses.
An online magazine with a writing course for bloggers, for instance, will need a different type of website template than an online store with a course on running a small business, because the user has different requirements. In the former, easily clickable story layouts are essential. In the latter, buttons to complete purchases and links to other recommended items are important.
Online course templates should help you deliver learning materials effectively. For example, the businesses above might want the ability to add a course page to an existing business website, while someone who’s only a course creator may just want a way to upload their course syllabus and run quizzes.
But, every instructor needs different website features to organize their course, depending on what they’re teaching. Squarespace websites are designed with specific types of businesses in mind and there are a number of templates to choose from that are ideal for hosting online courses.
Such templates offer a huge amount of flexibility in terms of what types of content can be added. An online educator can deliver some course content via video, some via a self-written e-book, and some via an RSS feed to a podcast. Your website template needs to be able to seamlessly integrate all the different types of content you wish to host for your students.
Social content that reflects the visual identity of your online course
It’s important to get your courses in front of potential students, and social media marketing is one of the best ways to do it. To get the most out of your social channels, try to develop brand consistency between your website, your course, and your social platforms.
From a visual perspective, that can be done relatively simply by making sure your profile header images are consistent with your website branding, and make sure any images and videos you upload to social include aspects of your site’s visual identification system (VIS).
There are tools, such as Unfold, you can use to enhance the connectivity between your website branding and your social branding. Unfold’s customizable templates allow you to mirror your website’s look and feel while giving you engaging visual features to use, such as filters, stickers, and stamps.
Squarespace Courses comes with beautifully designed and flexible course layouts that can help you create custom branding for your online course.
Learn how to earn an income from online courses
This post was updated on August 21, 2023.