The system I use to host my courses, called Podia, had an update 🙌 which allows me to build a better website. Here what's changed.

Categories

My products are now separated in categories. This wasn't possible before and it's a new feature of Podia! Now you can display easily:

• the video courses: for the lazy learners 

• the books: for those motivated to read

• the resources: for those who just want to get shit done with templates and tools

• upcomming: for the curious ones who want to see what are the next products coming out

A new system for the blog

I want to have as few subscriptions possible to run the Academy 💸. Until today for the website, I used both Podia and Squarespace. I used mainly Squarespace for its blog feature.

The problem is that Podia hasn't a proper blog feature. But Podia has a great system to create online courses where parts of the course can be previewed for free.

The new blog home page

So now, the blog is basically a Podia Course that is all available in public. It looks a bit less like a blog, but at least now I don't need to spend 12$ per month just to run a blog.

One platform

As said before I'm planning to ditch Squarespace. So soon, the home page of the Academy will be the home of the store.

Approach
So I updated the home of the store to contain also the approach text that describes the learning and teaching philosophy behind the Academy.

Bot
I can't include the bot as before on every page within a bubble, so now the chatbot, call her Heidi, is in the navigation. Just click on Heidi when you are on the store.

Honored section
As I'm having more and more customers I have now a nice list of well know organizations in which my customers work. I added a few of these brands to reassure potential new buyers of the quality of the courses. You know the usual: if Visa or Vodafone guys love this content, I might too.

The honored section on the home of the store

Updated style

As I was updating the website I kept on working and made a bit of "spring cleaning session" as Swiss German call these moments where you clean the whole house.

The product pages have now a more consistent look with bigger illustrations and more subtle design. Say bye bye to the big red rectangles, everything is purer now.

Example of a product page with its big illustration

Example of a book product page

How long did it take?

The idea of this little behind the scenes blog is also to show to potential educational content creators what effort it takes to build such a project. So here a bit of information from my time tracking software 🤓

It took me about 6 hours to do the whole website refresh.
There is still a lot of work to do in order to finalize the transition between Squarespace and Podia,

My todo list of little backend things I need to do to finish the transition

So as I'm still playing with the new website style and finishing the last tasks I think the whole website update will take me between 8 to 10 hours.

— Written on June 15, 2019