Webvanta Blog: Creating Effective Websites

Continuing Education Site Delivers Self-Service Courses

Continuing education is a mandate in many fields. The web is an excellent mechanism for delivering such training to professionals who may be located anywhere and for whom attending a classroom presentation may be difficult.

Webvanta recently completed a new website for ATrain Education, one of the premiere suppliers of continuing education training for nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and related professions. The new site replaces a custom-built, PHP-based site that required many business processes to be performed manually, was hard to update, and had some weak spots in user experience.

This was an exciting project because we were able to not only deliver a better experience for the site’s customers, but also to dramatically streamline the business operations.

The site delivers a polished presentation of course content, and also automates grading of courses, payment processing, and creation of completion certificates as PDF files.

Anyone can view all the courses without registering, which makes all course material indexable by search engines. To take a test, users must register, which is free. Payment is required only after passing a test, if the user wants a certificate of completion.

Improving the User Experience

In addition to a much-enhanced visual design, the new site provides people taking courses with a variety of new features:

  • Partially completed tests can be saved and returned to later.
  • After a test is graded, for each incorrect answer a link is provided to the course material relevant to that question.
  • Students can log in to a member dashboard and access all their previously earned certificates as well as any in-progress courses.

Streamlining Business Processes

A particular emphasis for the new site was to make the operation of the business more efficient. In addition to the user-visible parts of the site, a custom dashboard allows the company’s managers to view sales reports, respond to customer service inquiries, and access a variety of other business information.

We look forward to watching ATrain Education continue to grow, taking advantage of the site’s superior SEO and the ease of adding new courses to expand the business.

Topics: Case Studies

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