What’s on the Menu for ConEd?
In many respects, continuing education is an easier sell than entry-level diver training.
- Your prospective customers generally have a better understanding of what’s involved than nondivers do about getting certified.
- The courses, being shorter and less involved, are easier to explain.
- With less in the way of academic study (and little or no pool work), it’s easy to sell the fun and enjoyment of getting out and going diving.
One thing you should avoid, however, is using overly complex diagrams to illustrate your continuing education program.
Charts such as this may do more to discourage enrollment than they do to help. Stick, instead, with simple illustrations that make the process easy to understand.
Our sample website takes a simple and easily understood approach to selling continuing education.
- The “home page” for continuing education provides a brief discussion of the benefits of continuing education and quick links to pages that describe the most popular ConEd courses in detail.
- Further down the page is a menu of all available courses. Each course is represented by a photo or icon, with a paragraph providing a brief overview, and a link to a page where divers can learn more. See example.
- Each individual course page answers the same six basic questions as the section on learning to dive (using the same recognizable icons to do so). The difference is, because there is less to explain, we can fit all of the necessary answers on a single page. See example.
In the accompanying article, the Top Ten Mistakes in Dive Store Website Design, we warn about the perils inherent in overwhelming visitors with paragraph after paragraph of unbroken text. These continuing education pages provide a good example of how to avoid that trap.
- The first step is to keep your prose short and to the point.
- Make extensive use of tables and bullet-point lists. These are easier for the average website visitor (who scans more than reads) to comprehend.
- As much as possible, break text up with images.
- Getting visitors to associate specific icons with certain types of information helps. In this case, the calendar icon always represents course schedules.
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