Imagine a supermarket with no aisles. Or, a music store with no artist segregation. Or, heck, Netflix without genre classification.
One word: Nightmarish. The moment you enter, you’re lost. So, so lost, that you can’t even find an exit.
Now, if only these three businesses had some sort of a categorization system in place for their products on display. Hmm, that would make browsing a breeze.
Doesn’t matter if you have three, thirty, or three hundred courses on sale. Categorizing them for better site navigation is one of the first things you need to do as the online school owner. After all, you wouldn’t want a prospective student to sift through tons of pages to find what they’re looking for.
So, breaking down your school’s courses and lectures into subject-wise categories (or any kind of categories depending upon your coaching model) would help them skip those three or four pesky steps, and reach their goal purchase faster.
In the School Builder, this imperative feat can be achieved with Categories. Two steps, and you’re done! Literally.
Let us show you how by taking our dummy school – The Sound of Music – as an example.
Step 1: Create Parent Categories
What are the major categories under which your courses and lectures can go? For instance, for our dmmy school – The Sound of Music – we have courses and lectures ranging from Guitar and Piano to Drums and Electronic. Under each of these lie tens of courses and lectures, so, these four become our parent categories.
Similarly, whatever niche your school is in, you need to break your courses and lectures down into a few parent categories, and then create subcategories under them for better filtering.
With that said, let’s create our school’s parent categories first by clicking on More and jumping to Categories.
This takes us to an empty Categories screen, where we shall click on Add Category to create our first category called Guitar. Here’s what opens up:
Fill it up with information about your category, so that your school visitors can better understand what lies within it.
- Title and URL: The title of your category, of course! Ours is Guitar, so we put Guitar. The URL alongside automatically gets populated by the same name.
- Color Code: Certain preset themes on our School Builder require that you put the hexadecimal code for this category to set it apart from the others on your site. If you want to keep all your categories uniform, you can skip this field.
- Description: Enter a 2-3 line description of what this category of courses and lectures is about, and what the students can achieve from it.
- Select Parent: While empty right now, this drop-down will be of use when you’re creating a subcategory and wish to map it to its parent. For example, a subcategory called Acoustic Guitar can go under the Guitar parent category once the latter is created.
- Category Icon and Category Image: Pretty self-explanatory, eh? Upload an image under each to prettify your category and more in sync with your school brand.
Fill it up, and click on Save to see a brand new category entry on the main screen.
There you go! Edit or delete this category at any time by clicking their dedicated icons under Options.
Similarly, we went ahead and created three more categories for our school by following the same process as above. See?
Now comes the fun part – breaking these parent categories into subcategories. Let’s check out how.
Step 2: Create Subcategories
Creating subcategories for your parent categories follows the same process, except this time, you will map the subcategory to its parent category form under Select Parent.
So, let’s click on Add Category and add Acoustic Guitar as a subcategory to Guitar.
Only this time, the Select Parent drop-down comes populated with the four new parent categories we built in Step 1.
So, we select Guitar from the drop-down menu, upload the rest of the information, and hit Save!
The result? This:
We went ahead, and added more categories under each of the parent categories.
Look at this; our courses and lectures now have their dedicated homes!
What was once a scattered view of your entire school on the frontend is now neatly arranged for a more pleasing student experience (the OCDs can stop flinching now!). See?
Right from your school’s homepage, students can directly jump to their desired category by selecting it from the drop-down menu here. And, just like that, all the collection of courses and lectures will be filtered down to the selected category, thereby, keeping any confusion at bay.
Fun fact: You can use our Site Menus feature to neatly arrange these categories anywhere on your site. For instance, we added these to our school site’s top menu like this:
How’s that for simpler site navigation?
So, once you have enough courses and lectures on your school on Ventture, give Categories a go, and gift your site visitors an exceptional navigation experience.
