How does Coursedate work with an existing training company website?
Coursedate works alongside your existing training company website. Training companies and other course providers that already have a well established website can link directly to their Coursedate course directory or choose a more integrated option. These are your options:
Option 1 - Provide links from your existing website to your course directory in Coursedate.
This is the simplest way to connect your course directory to a wider audience. And of course you can send out links in emails and post them on social media. Visitors to your website go to Coursedate to browse your courses, book online or make enquiries.
Lennon Training uses this approach - most of the people booking Lennon courses look at the courses on the default Lennon Training course directory page inside Coursedate.
The benefit of this approach is that it’s almost zero effort, and it’s a good solution for training companies that have very simple websites.
Option 2 - Create a single ‘Our Courses’ page (or re-purpose an existing page) in your website.
Create the single courses page and add the Coursedate multiple courses widget to it.
That will give you and visitors to your website a ‘live view’ of your Coursedate course directory - visitors to your site see published courses and categories inside your website. They can then filter courses by category.
BPX Training does this this. BPX use our multiple courses widget on a page on the main BPX website.
When a visitor clicks on a course to see more details they are taken to the course page in Coursedate where they can book or make a course enquiry.
Adding the multiple courses widget to a page in your website is easy - just 2 lines of code. Most Coursedate clients do it without support from their website developer. And of course, we can provide free support.
The benefit of this approach - you can ‘surface’ your courses inside your website and then build other content around them.
Option 3 - Create a page per course in your website
Create a page per course in your existing website and then add our single course widget to each of those pages - configured to show content for that course that comes from your Coursedate course directory.
This is a training course page on the Sheaf Digital website. Each Sheaf Digital training course has its own page in the website using 'live data' from Sheaf Digital's Coursedate account.
Many training companies and course providers already have those individual course pages in their websites - but they contain static content. This option means you replace that static content with live data from your Coursedate course directory.
The page per course approach may take a little longer to set up, but the benefits are:
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Visitors to your website see your courses in the context of your website and with your existing branding.
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A course description in your website is automatically updated when you update the course in Coursedate.
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Visitors to your website see up-to-date information about venues, dates and places available - in your website.
And there is another option - configure your Coursedate Course Portal
There is now another option for training providers that want even more control over course directory branding. The latest Coursedate release now includes ‘course portals’. You can showcase your courses in a separate course portal - that uses your own branding (logo, colours etc). It doesn’t sit inside your website, but you can link to it and provide a consistent, seamless experience for the people who are browsing and then booking on your courses.
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