09: An Overview of Squarespace Courses
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00:00 The term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace, Incorporated.
00:03 This content is not affiliated with Squarespace, Incorporated.
00:06 Welcome to Think Inside the Square, a podcast full of quick tips and tricks
00:10 that will help you create a Squarespace website that you're proud of.
00:13 I'm your host, Becca Harpain, creator of Insidethesquare.co, and in this episode,
00:18 we'll be talking about one of the brand new features available in Squarespace, known as Squarespace Courses.
00:23 That's right.
00:24 We can now host a course entirely on your Squarespace website, and in this episode, I'll teach you all about it.
00:30 For a transcript of this episode, along with the links to any resources mentioned, visit Insidethesquare.co/podcast.
00:40 Released on August 21, 2023, squarespace Courses is a new type of collection page.
00:47 A course is structured with chapters, and inside those chapters, you can have individual lessons.
00:52 Lessons have all kinds of design flexibility when it comes to actually displaying the content.
00:58 But in this specific episode, I want to talk more about courses, holistically,
01:02 how to set one up, what some of your main options are, and we'll do a little overview about how
01:07 to actually structure your course using all of the cool features built into Squarespace.
01:12 I also want to mention I know personally that Squarespace is working on even more updates to this course's feature,
01:18 so I'll be recording future episodes about some of the cool things that they'll be adding.
01:24 I also want to mention that in this episode, I am not discussing pricing.
01:29 Pricing depends on your specific setup subscription model that you're using,
01:32 what you're charging for your course, what payment processor you use.
01:36 There are all kinds of different factors that go into pricing, and I will not be discussing that in this episode.
01:42 For information about pricing, please go to squarespace.com pricing.
01:47 All right, let's get back to talking about courses in general.
01:50 They are a type of collection page.
01:52 Inside a course, you have chapters.
01:55 These chapters are like folders.
01:57 Inside each folder, you have individual lessons.
02:00 These lessons are individual pages.
02:02 These pages can have a main video associated with them that will be featured prominently at the top of the lesson page.
02:08 Or you can choose not to have a video at all, because on that page,
02:12 video or not, you can have multiple page sections with all kinds of content.
02:17 I recommend using Fluid Engine sections because that gives us the ability to not only have the ultimate design flexibility
02:23 for the content of that section, but we can also edit mobile separately, which I think is awesome.
02:30 Now, these collection pages have two different ways to access them.
02:34 You can require people to create a login to access the course content with their email address and their own password.
02:41 Now, you can do this if the course is free or if it's paid.
02:44 If you're offering a free course, you don't have to require a login at all.
02:48 It can be completely free and accessible by anyone.
02:51 But if you do offer a paid course, you need to have people log in to access the content.
02:57 One of the cool features of Courses is that you can track their progress if you do require people to log in.
03:03 Here's what I mean by that.
03:05 If they're working their way through the lessons in your course, there is a neat little feature with a checkmark.
03:10 As soon as they've completed that lesson, or clicked the complete button on the lesson,
03:15 it will be noted on their profile that they've made it through that content and they've moved on to the next lesson.
03:21 This is a brand new feature that we've never had in any other type of collection page.
03:25 That information, that progress.
03:27 It's tracked on their profile.
03:28 So you can find out information about how people are working their way through your course content.
03:34 One of the other cool features that we've never seen before is the brand new sidebar inside Courses.
03:40 As you're working your way through lessons, you can click a little icon and this
03:43 icon will pull open a list of the chapters and lessons inside that course.
03:48 So people have this subnavigation to click around and access different content.
03:52 Again, a brand new feature we've never seen before.
03:55 Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about the content inside the course that's specific for squarespace.
04:01 The course itself has a name, a navigation title, a URL slug,
04:06 which is what you'll say like yourdomain.com forward slash, whatever the course is, and then a course summary.
04:13 This summary can be pulled by content blocks and shown on other pages.
04:17 So it's a great idea to write a concise, engaging summary that tells people what your course is about.
04:23 Just a basic overview to get them excited.
04:25 Now, the chapters themselves are only titles.
04:28 Remember, it's a folder that holds all of the lessons.
04:31 So when you're creating your course content for a chapter, all you need is a title.
04:36 But the lesson, we've got a lot of other options there.
04:39 Every single lesson has a title.
04:41 It can have an excerpt, which I strongly recommend.
04:44 Just a concise little paragraph, some engaging content about what the lesson is about, then a specific URL.
04:51 Each lesson can have a thumbnail.
04:53 This is optional, but it's displayed on the overview page and in the sidebar navigation.
04:59 So I strongly recommend it.
05:01 Each lesson can have a video, but it's not required.
05:04 You can just have standard page sections with content.
05:07 But if you do upload a video for a lesson, it'll be placed at the very top of the page in a really cool looking layout.
05:13 Those videos themselves can have cover images which can help it load faster on smaller screens like mobile devices.
05:19 So that again is recommended if you decide to upload a video.
05:23 Now, on these lesson pages, again we can have page sections.
05:27 And in those page sections you can have all kinds of additional lesson materials cheat sheets,
05:31 resource links, any additional content that your students might need.
05:35 Now, assuming you've already outlined your course, you've got the chapters, you've got the lessons.
05:39 How do you actually add this content to squarespace?
05:42 Now, this is a podcast, so I don't have any visuals here, but head on over to
05:47 Forward Slash Podcast to see some links to resources that will help explain this whole concept for you.
05:53 But here's kind of a five step overview.
05:56 First step, create that course in the not linked section of your site.
06:00 You don't want people to access it until you're ready.
06:03 Second step, remove all the demo content.
06:06 The fastest way, delete a chapter.
06:08 This will remove all the lessons inside that chapter.
06:10 Just get rid of everything because you want to replace it with your own.
06:14 That brings us to the third step.
06:16 Update the description on the course overview page.
06:19 This description, it's a little bit different than your course summary, and you've got to update it on the overview page itself.
06:25 So make sure you update that replacing the demo content with your own.
06:29 The fourth step is to choose the layout options you want for your course overview.
06:33 You've got some different options for spacing and sidebar navigation, so check out those settings.
06:38 And then the fifth step is to design your lesson pages.
06:42 Fun fact here, you can duplicate a lesson page to recreate a similar look for all your content.
06:48 I like to design a specific type of lesson page, knowing that I'm going to want to recreate this for multiple lessons.
06:56 Let's say I've got a video, I've got a cheat sheet that goes with that video.
06:59 I have some additional resources I want people to download.
07:02 I'll design this lesson.
07:04 I'll structure it so it looks absolutely perfect on desktop and on mobile.
07:09 And then I will treat that as a template and I'll duplicate it and update the content for every single lesson.
07:15 It'll save you a ton of time.
07:17 Now, after you've done all of this, those five steps to create it, definitely explore the customization options.
07:24 Inside the font menu and the color menu, you'll find new features that are specific for courses, so definitely check those out.
07:30 And when you're done with all of that, you're ready to decide whether or not you want this to be a free course or a paid course.
07:36 You set this up in the course settings, and then you drag it to your main navigation.
07:40 Or you send people directly to that URL in the Not Linked section of your site because you're ready to launch.
07:46 Now, we've covered a lot of content here.
07:48 I totally understand if you've got to repeat this episode, but if you're more of a visual learner like me, don't worry.
07:54 I've written all of this out for you in an in depth course creation checklist.
07:59 It covers all of this magic.
08:01 Available now at insidethesquare.co/podcast
08:05 I've got a bunch of other resources that I've linked to that are going to help you create your very first course on Squarespace.
08:12 We'll go ahead and call this episode a wrap because I want to keep these nice and concise.
08:16 Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Think Inside the Square.
08:19 I truly hope you enjoyed it.
08:21 I have a lot more tips and tricks to share with you about making an amazing Squarespace website that is uniquely yours,
08:27 so be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you happen to be listening to this episode.
08:32 And one last time, head on over to Forward Slash podcast for a transcript and links to all of the resources that I mentioned.
08:40 Thanks again for listening and most importantly, have fun with your bye for now.
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Free Overview of Squarespace Courses: insidethesquare.co/course
Squarespace Course Workshop: insidethesquare.co/courseworkshop
