How to Create an Educational Website or a Learning Management System

According to Forbes, the online learning market is projected to reach $325B in size by 2025 which is almost triple what it used to be a couple of years ago. It shows us that online education isn’t only relevant now but will also be in the nearest future.

In this article, we’ll go over the details of developing your educational website or course selling page. So if you want to know how a modern website can boost your e-Learning business — and what it takes to build one — hold the line :)

🎁 Benefits of Creating an Educational Website

Before we start talking about how to develop a website, let’s quickly recall why do so in the first place:

• You can reach a wider audience.

First of all, there’s no geolocation dependency anymore. Thus, you significantly increase your reach. Besides, you reach people who simply like e-Learning better than in-person.

Additionally, due to the COVID-19 consequences, many people prefer distance learning to in-person learning now since it’s much safer and helps to “flatten the curve”.

• You can reuse the content you create multiple times.

It’s quite beneficial that once recorded or created content is reusable and you can offer it to many clients.

Let’s say you have a business school. Without a website, only one class can take place at the same time for a limited number of people.

However, if you do have a website, you can record this class and offer it to as many people as there are on your website.

Still, don’t forget to update the information on your website from time to time.

• You can fully customize it to match your business needs.

Whether it’s a whole new business model or just a couple of activities you want to deliver online — websites work well in most cases.

You can also use your website to either create a new project that exists separately from the offline one (meaning, it has its clients, courses, content, teachers) and thus, expand your clientele.

Alternatively, you can use it to improve the experience of your existing and new students (for checking home tasks online, sending e-content, encouraging online cooperation via chats, forums, etc.).

• Improve reach and retention.

A potential website can give users multiple features such as customization, device compliance, personalization, etc., and improve your personal brand which can then positively influence your reach, retention and engagement.

📐 Customized Website vs Website Builders: Which One to Choose?

There are a lot of website builders (or website constructors) — tools that allow people to create an e-learning site without manual coding. However, many businesses and organizations still prefer to develop a customized website.

Let’s take a closer look at both solutions.

Top Cases to Use a Website Constructor 🔨

This option is just the catch for businesses and startups that don’t need a custom website at their current stage. This happens most often in the following cases:

🔝 Top Things to Keep in Mind While Creating an Educational or Course Selling Website

In the online education industry, there’s strong competition. Coursera, EdX, Skillshare, Skyeng, Lingoda, and many others — all of them successfully run their businesses right now.

Thus, you have to take the preparation stage seriously and have your skates on once you enter the market.

Even if you already have an offline business, many details of running an online one may be new to you, so it’s worth spending quite some time educating yourself.

We’ve come up with a couple of steps that we recommend you follow to start your online business as flawlessly as possible.

Different purposes 🎯

First things first, you may want to build an online course or educational website for various reasons.

It’s of high importance to clearly set goals since they’ll define the number of features, the website’s structure complexity, and thus, the budget and time needed for its development.

So, it can be:

• A course selling website

You can build online courses dedicated to various topics from UI/UX Design to Chinese and offer them to users.

A good example of such a solution is Сodecademy who offer coding courses.

They have a free offer with only the basic courses as well as a paid subscription. These guys also provide courses for businesses and teams - a great example of how a course selling website can work.

Keep in mind, we’re not only talking about education from a classical point of view. You can create an online workshop for time-management, set up an online course where you give advice on how to control your anger, and so on.

• A marketplace website

This type of website is where you allow other business owners and seekers to provide content and use it respectively.

And most of them (Skyeng, Lingoda, Skillshare, etc.) are like this they have a white background and a contrast color for buttons and text.

Depending on the goal you pursue, you might want to use different colors. For instance, if you provide a finance course, it’s not reasonable to make the website bright red or yellow. You would probably choose something more formal.

But if it’s a yoga course, you might want to use green or light blue, or some other calm color.

Up-to-date information 📖

Nowadays, information can become outdated in a matter of weeks. Technologies get updated, new information comes in every single day; all of these factors make regular info updates one of the most important things when creating a course for your website.

Thus, it’s essential to make your content as new, relevant and accurate as possible.

If you use outdated information on your website, the client can:

• Hesitate about your commitment.
• Think you no longer do business.
• Choose another service.

Besides, it’s not good for your position on the market.

By not using and implementing new data, you may fall behind and ultimately get out of business in the long run.

🌀 LMS vs. Website

While creating an educational website, you’ll most likely come across the term LMS. So, we decided to walk you through the basic information about it.

Let’s do it this way: we would try to predict your questions and make a little FAQ right here, in this article.

So, what is a learning management system (LMS)?

It’s a software application for documentation, tracking, administration, and delivery of educational courses, training programs for companies, or just development courses.

What functionality does it have?

You can develop a learning management system to create courses, automate data collection and analysis, conduct employee certifications, run tests, monitor each user’s activity, and so much more.

✅ Top Features of an Educational Website

In this section, we’ll review the main features an educational or course selling website should have.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

This feature is very important since it’s the first impression potential customers get when first using your services.

So, how do you make a compelling impression?

First of all, make signing up as fast and convenient as possible. It’s essential because if customers have to spend a lot of time typing in their personal information just to enter the catalog of services, their engagement is most likely to drop before they even get a glance of what is available.

Consider having users sign up after you show them your services and all terms & pricing. This can help you build a trusting and transparent relationship with them.

To make signing up just a quick and not stressful step, ask users the following:

• Phone number, email, or login (one of three).
• Password.

Profile for each group can consist of:

• The list of participants.
• Attendance.
• Assignments (submitted/incomplete).
• Grades.
• Chat for a group and private comments.

It’s also reasonable to create a separate profile for each student which would basically have the same information but it would be a lot easier to see work with since there would be no information overload.

💰 How Much Does LMS Development Cost?

To provide you with a rough estimation of what an educational website development might cost, we've created with table with various flows that you might need to implement. The cost per hour for the development is based on the Eastern European price range.