How to create an edu. website from scratch? What do you need for this? Do you need professional IT help? To create a quality educational website, you need this guide, a little patience, and your own time. Below you will find practical tips with which you can start creating your edu. platform.
Basic Types of Educational Sites
To get started with edu. website development, you firstly have to define your purpose and the target audience since all the UI/UX, design and content elements should be perfectly tailored to their specific necessities. Below are three main types of educational sites depending on the use case and business goal:
- For school, college, or university. Such sites provide information regarding the educational institution, teachers, courses, and classes that they offer. Also, such sites contain important information for students.
- For online education. This site offers educational materials, tutorials, and online classes/courses. Modern eLearning websites are also largely powered by innovations like AR and interactive elements like videos, quizzes and so on.
- For members of educational institutions. This site is intended for students and teachers to log in and get the data they need. Teachers can create courses, monitor the success of their students while students can access online classes, submit homework assignments, and so on.
Educational Site Pillar Elements
What do you need to create an educational website? Here is a shortlist of the most essential features you can’t go without:
- Home page: This is the first page of your resource. It may contain a logo, images, important notices, and so on. Still, don’t overload it – leave a lot of while space and publish relevant information only.
- About Us. Here you need to provide basic information of the educational institution, location, licenses, certificates, and so on.
- Courses. Here you can share detailed information about courses, lessons and so on.
- Biography. You can provide information about teachers and their experience.
- Registration form. You can create a form that students can use to access educational information or sign up for a course.
- Contacts. You can provide contact details or create a request to receive contact data.
Surely, the list of the essential features should be expanded to meet the specific goals of your edu. website. But as for the “getting-started” website version, the ones outlined above will be enough.
Guide For Creating an Educational Website
Below you will find a short and free tutorial with easy steps to making a website for the educational industry.
Find a Suitable Domain Name
Find the appropriate domain name for your educational website. It is recommended to use a branded domain with the name of your school as this will act as a sign of trust for users.
You can use a tool like Namesilo to make sure the name you want is available. As in the registration of trademarks, there can’t be any coincidences here. Also, accredited US institutions of higher education can apply for websites with edu. domain names in 2021.
Сhoose a Website Builder
If you are going to create a website yourself, turn your attention to WordPress. This functionality is relatively easy to use, but you may find it necessary to find out more about the WordPress features and technical capabilities. However, there are a lot of guides and tutorials in the public domain that will allow you to figure it out very quickly. The advantage of this functionality is the presence of many useful plugins, ease of use, reliability, and the ability to create a quality resource with a limited budget.
Install WordPress
To install this functionality, no special skills and knowledge are required since everything is quite simple. Explore the admin panel, and use educational materials to quickly understand all the nuances.
Install a Relevant Theme
WP offers a good arsenal of themes to meet any need. Give preference to themes that look professional without any frills. Also, you should give preference to themes with a good rating. It is better to choose the themes created by professional developers. Although they come for a fee (which is quite reasonable), choosing a well-developed theme will secure you from the problems both with the functionality of the site and search engine ranking.
Install Useful Plugins
WP also offers a huge number of plugins that allow you to create not only a high-quality but also a niche site. There are a lot of specialized tools that are useful for educational sites. For example, such a plugin as LearnDash allows you to develop multi-level courses, create assignments, and encourage users to leave comments.
Create Your Content
Now it’s time to create quality content and promote your site. Prepare quality and useful materials for your website. For this content to be ranked well, consider developing an effective SEO strategy. In a nutshell, make sure your content is filled with relevant keywords, well-structured, readable, and useful – this is already half the job for SEO success.
Build Backlinking Base
After your site is ready and filled with content, you need to start SEO optimization of your site. To do this, you need to use up-to-date and effective SEO strategies. For example, you can implement an .edu link building strategy using professional services that specialize in generating edu backlinks. How to get edu. backlinks and why do you need them?
Edu. backlinks are powerful and reputable in the eyes of search engines. The more edu. backlinks you have for your website, the better it will be ranked in SERP.
Social media is good for promoting your educational institution and getting traffic to your website. Don’t forget to add the appropriate social media buttons to your site so that users can share your posts on social media. It will also allow you to highlight important content from your site on your social profiles. And of course, a well-developed social presence is another sign of trust and credibility for most modern students.
Analyze Your Site
To understand what works on your site, what is missing, and what is not useful, you need to constantly analyze the results you get from your SEO and marketing efforts on the web. To do this, you can use Google Analytics to receive important information about the site promptly.
Final Notes
Creating an edu. website may seem challenging at first. Still, everything isn’t so difficult. Get started by obtaining an edu. domain, create your website on WordPress to make it user and SEO-friendly and start promoting it across the channels.
Author Bio
Nancy P. Howard has been working as a journalist at the online magazine in London for a year. She is also a professional writer in such topics as blogging, IT and marketing.