A Complete Guide For Building Finer Teaching Websites

We are living in a pandemic phase and we are growing through it as well and technology has become an integral part of our lives now. We were all a little tech-savvy before but right now we are living in the time when everything is online be it shopping, working, making payments or teaching. Teaching websites are gaining momentum now and they are becoming a crucial platform for communicating with kids and teaching them concepts with ease. In terms of the education sector, the virtual classrooms have taken the place of the actual school.

The ways in which we teach and learn have been continuously evolving and it is important to change with time. If you are into the teaching industry or a teacher yourself, what you need is an appropriate website to portray the various areas you teach about. Your website can be your learning and teaching hub where your students can connect with you.

Irrespective of whether you are a full-time teacher who is looking for better ways to deliver the course or if you are a part-time tutor who is trying to work and teaching assignments, this article will provide you the best information about putting it all together in a website.

Every modern educator today is better off with a website!

This guide will help you to improvise on your website if you already have one and if you don’t have one, you’ll be able to set up a website.

Why Is It Important To Have A Website For Every Teacher?

If you have just started your teaching career or if you have been involved in the education industry for a very long time; setting up a website will prove to be a smart move for you. Think about this, you will be able to put out all of your teaching information on the website not just the videos. You can have a blog on your website through which you can give out a lot of important information and this will help you in advancing professionally.

Here are some important reasons why teaching websites are important and if you have a website how can you improvise on it:

Connect With Other Teachers And Progress Your Career

A website provides you the capability to portray your talent and expertise. With a professionally designed website and blog, you can share all the information and tips on the blog.

For instance, if you have created a new lesson plan or if you have interestingly made use of various types of media to make the concepts easy and interesting for the students. You can also experiment with the other teaching methods and make them live only if you think that they work. You can try something new and you can also understand what works best for you and your students. You can also connect with the other teachers in your field and get their opinion about the teaching methods you are using.

When you establish your own platform, you are establishing a brand that portrays your teaching skills and your career.

As a teacher, your experience and knowledge is worth sharing. When you get feedback for your teaching lessons, you will be able to improvise on it. A website provides you a great platform to share your voice and skills and your classroom and teaching sessions are open for the world to see, you have endless opportunities to connect with students and teachers.

The best thing about having a website is that at a later point in time if you decide to transform your career from teaching to selling online courses, you can do that in the best possible way through your website.

Provide Alternative Educational Resources

Quite frequently you might be coming across students who are interested in learning more about some topics that you teach. Many times your students would be doing their own research or they might be reading books about the topics that they are really interested in.

But now you have the option to create explanatory education resources on your own website and put together educational content that can be referred to by your students. In this content, you can include images, infographics, videos, PDFs and much more. All this information can be portrayed on your website and displayed in a way that is easily understandable.

As you have a website, you get the opportunity to offer various educational alternatives and solutions to your students who learn differently.

Within a classroom, you strive to provide the finest educational experience for any number of students present. You can utilize your website for using various types of media so that this will help the students who cannot learn in the classroom and these students can have a fulfilling learning experience as well.

Create An Additional Source Of Income

When you set up your own website, you are presented with the opportunity to earn some additional income through it. With the expertise and experience that you have created over the years, you can easily start teaching online or individually and you also have the capacity to create and publish your own online courses.

The online education and training sphere continues to evolve every year, there are new concepts and information being invented. In light of this fact, your website becomes your foundation and you can take complete advantage of the ever-evolving teaching industry.

Who knows with time the income that you earn by publishing online courses will supersede the income that you earned by teaching traditionally.

Here are some amazing tips for improving your teaching website:

1. Define Your Vision And Purpose

This is an important step because your vision, purpose and value will create the foundation for your website and your website will be more focused. You must be well aware of the reason behind creating your website. Think about this – you were providing online teaching before but what drove you to set up your own website? The purpose behind creating your own website will also help you to design the website and define the categories.

For instance, a website that is created for the enhancement of your individual classes will look and function differently as compared to a website of a freelancing tutor or teacher.

Think about the questions mentioned below to define the purpose of your website:

Which goal/goals do you wish to achieve through your website?
Is your website completely based on providing coursework, information or resources to the students?
Will your website feature and promote your services like tutor services or selling of online courses?
Are there any existing websites in line with your purpose and would you like to take inspiration from them?

These are just some basic questions that will make your vision clear; but you need to know that your website is much more than this and you will need a clear focus. You can take your time to do this cause this is the most important first step. A clear definition of your goals will also avoid any unnecessary and time-consuming confusion and distractions at a later point in time.

When a visitor comes to your website, the visitor should immediately know what your website is all about. If the visitor gets confused about your website, it is not doing its job well.

Don’t jump to creating your website right away! Take your time and think about what you want to achieve through the website and think about who will be using your website.

2. Create The Integral Website Pages

Below mentioned are some important pages that you will have to create for your teaching website:

Home Page : This is the first page of your website that greets the visitors and therefore it is the most important one and it should be built with a lot of consideration and precision. This page should consist of a brief summary of what your website is all about and what it offers. Use minimal call-to-actions wherever possible and make sure that the navigation to the other pages of your website is clear and rightly placed on the header section of the home page.

Keep the content simple yet empowering!

About Page : This is where you portray your experiences and your goals. The ‘About Us’ page or the ‘About’ page is one of the most searched pages and most people prefer to go on the about page right after checking out the home page of your website. Writing only about yourself can surely get difficult at times but then you can mention information about your students and what your visitors can get from the website. You can write about how your experience and knowledge can help in transforming the life of your students and how you help in advancing them and motivating them in their lives.

Portfolio : Usually all the websites do not have a portfolio section but this is an important section for the teaching websites. You might or might not have the portfolio section right away but you need to think about having this section down the line. Showcasing your past work and achievements is surely going to benefit you. For instance, if you are a teacher who teaches in the standard classroom, you can create videos about your teaching style and add them to the portfolio page or if you have been generally working in the field of education since a long time, you can write about the results that your students have got through your teaching.

Coursework : This is also a very important section of a teaching website in fact the most important one. Through a coursework or resources section, you can create a hub of information that contains all the data about the subjects you teach and various other subjects that are related to it. If you are planning to create a WordPress website or if you have a WordPress website, you can create the coursework through WordPress plugins or you can also make use of the media embedding tools that will help you in hosting your videos and putting out information and for enabling digital downloads.

Here are some useful WordPress plugins that you can use for creating the coursework:

Blog : You must have a blog for your teaching website where you can put out all the information you need. Your blog can consist of fun and interesting content that your students, readers and visitors will love to read. By having a nice and informative blog, you will not just be able to share your videos but you will also be able to get new leads, new students and new readers. You can keep the blog simple by just sharing some important tips and your perspective on things.

Upgrade Your Website Plugins And Software

You have a wide range of plugins, software and themes available for setting up and managing your website especially if you are working with WordPress. You must use the necessary plugins to make your tasks easier. However, it is important to upgrade these plugins and software regularly. When you receive new updates for the plugins or software you are using it is important to update them as they will include more fixes and more features. Keeping your plugins and software updated will simplify your work.

Plan Your Service Offerings

If you plan to use your website to sell your services, then your website requirements will be a little different. You will still have some common pages are structure like the one mentioned above but it will be great if you break down your services and highlight them separately through distinct website pages.

Keep Updating Your Knowledge

Change is constant! If you haven’t gone through your website in a lot of time, then go through it now and see what you can improvise on. Check every link of your website and read all the website pages. You might be working at a middle school or a high school but some things have to be updated. You have to make sure that when students and parents come to your website, they are greeted with an informative and interesting website that they will love to browse through.

Setting up a great website will also help you to create good relationships with teachers and parents. If parents want to know more about the education that their children are taking, all they have to do is go to your website and get all the information they need.

You can put out important notifications about upcoming events if any, class schedules and other online teaching sessions that you are going to conduct.

Over to you…

A website is going to be a powerful asset for you. If you invest time in setting up a full-fledged teaching website, it will affect the quality of your teaching and help you to excel in your career. Your website will be a valuable source of information for your students, readers and followers and they can always come back to your website in case they miss something. Even though things might seem a little difficult initially, it won’t be difficult for you to manage your website after a certain point of time but think about this – you will be able to advance your career, improve the education of your students, establish better parent-teacher relationships and earn additional income as well.