Development

Support Your Clients with a Custom Training Center

Our Training Center has been an important client resource for years, but during the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s become even more popular. It gives us a way to connect with our clients in a way that’s helpful, not pushy. It empowers clients who want to learn more about improving their web presence to learn in a way that’s adaptable to their schedules and always accessible.

Woman on a video conference on her laptop

We’re not the only business that needs a tool like the Training Center — a knowledge base that can be shared with clients or staff, either for free or behind a paywall or password. Lots of businesses have realized they could use a content library to help connect with clients, but they’re stopped by 1) the huge task of creating content for it, and 2) the expense of building the product.

We can make both of those things easy. If you already have blogs, videos, articles you often link to, or even well-written customer service emails that you regularly send out, you can repurpose those for your Training Center. And because we’ve already created the product, you can use your company’s brand colors and logo to make the site suit your business — without taking on the expense of custom development.

We can think of so many ways you could adapt the Training Center to your company’s needs — you can create a dashboard for clients or use it to onboard clients. You could use it as a staff resource library. Or you can set up a knowledge base like we did. Here are the features we built for our Training Center (because we couldn’t find them anywhere else).

We Can Avoid Duplicate Content

We wanted to have all our content available in one place, but we couldn’t just copy blog posts into the Training Center — that would mean the same content would exist in two different places on our site. Google hates that, and it’s not helpful for users. Items in our Training Center table of contents can work in one of two ways: they can link to an article that actually “lives” on the Training Center and only exists there, or they can link off to our blog, so we’re never duplicating content.

We Added Three Ways to Search

Different people navigate websites differently, so users can search our Training Center three different ways: by using the table of contents, by using the category dropdown at the top of the page, or by using the search field.

We Can Add One Article in Multiple Categories

We have several articles that apply to different categories: An article on setting up a blog in WordPress might go in both “Blog” and “WordPress.” A video tutorial on using LinkedIn belongs in both “Social Media” and “Videos.” Because the articles show up in both places, users can navigate by searching the category they’re interested in instead of browsing the entire site.

We Can Link Directly to Our Site, Not YouTube

If we’re sharing a video like a webinar through YouTube on our social media channels, we want that link to come back to our site — it builds domain authority, and it lets the user discover more about our company while they’re on the site. The Training Center lets us do that without writing a long blog just to include a link; we can add a short paragraph. We also like to link to our presentation slides from the same area.

Article Names Can Be Straightforward

When headline writing for a blog, you’re trying to grab attention. But on the Training Center, we want to prioritize clarity instead of catchiness, so we can adapt way the title displays on the Training Center table of contents. For example, we have a blog called “Ecommerce the Easy Way,” but its Training Center title is “Ecommerce: Tips for Getting Started,” which is more clear to the user who’s searching the Training Center to try to figure out which ecommerce article will be most useful to them.

We Can Link to Offsite Blogs

Our Training Center is a teaching tool, so sometimes it make sense to link to a resource created by Google or Facebook or whichever other entity actually created the software or service in question. Because we can link offsite, we can collect helpful links for our clients in one place.

If you’re interested in what a Training Center can do for your company, we’d love to chat. The next step is filling out the contact form on this page; we’ll set up a short conversation about what we can provide. There’s no charge and no commitment for this call — we just want to know how we can help.

Carrie

About Carrie

Carrie has been copyediting and writing for fifteen years. Her skills were forged in the newsroom at The Birmingham Post-Herald and she’s a huge book nerd (she moonlights as Southern Living’s book reviewer), but a love of paper and ink hasn’t stopped her from mastering the digital world as well: She’s had a blog pretty much since they existed, and she’s run social media for companies big and small. Carrie’s always ready to take on a new communication challenge, lecture us about the proper use of semicolons, or defend the fact that her Instagram account is filled with selfies.

See more articles from Carrie Rollwagen

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