Creating a Course: The Course Details Page

If you wanted to create an online course from scratch, you would have to spend hours setting up pages, configuring membership plugins, and making sure that your courses are secure behind a login. Thankfully, Zippy Courses automates all of those processes for you, so you can focus on one thing: creating the course itself!

It's easy to create a course with lessons, access tiers, scheduled delivery of content, and more with Zippy Courses. In this article, we'll create your first course and get acquainted with the Course Editor.

To create a new course, login to the WordPress dashboard, and click on the Zippy Courses menu item in the left sidebar. This brings you to the Zippy Courses Dashboard where you'll see a list of your courses and a button labelled New Course. Click this button to create a new course.

You'll arrive at the Add New Course screen. Below the title field, you'll find the Course Editor which is divided into four main tabs: Course Details, Units & Lessons, Public Details, and Additional Content. If you've enabled any email list providers, a fifth tab, Email Lists, will be visible too.

The first three tabs guide you through the steps for creating your course. This article will focus on Course Details, which is for the basic details of your course.

Set Up Course Details

You can think of the Course Details page as the course's home page. The details you enter on the Course Details tab page will display on the course home page like the one below. On this example, we see:

  1. Course Title – "Learn the Basics of Zippy Courses"
  2. Featured Image for the course
  3. Course home page content – The text which appears above the list of Units & Lessons.

Course Title

The first detail of your course is the title. The title will be displayed on the Course Details page, the Course Directory, the Dashboard page, and during the checkout process.

Customize the Permalink

When you click the Save Draft button, the permalink will appear below the course title. The permalink is the URL to your course page and is made up of the title of your course. You can click the Edit button next to the permalink to edit the slug (the part after /course). This is useful if you have a very long course title or if you'd like to give your course an easy-to-remember URL.

Note: If the button next to the permalink says Change Permalinks, go to the Settings → Permalinks screen, and choose a permalink structure other than the default.

Course Home Page Content

The post editor on the Course Details tab is for the content that will be displayed to students on the course page above the Units & Lessons.

We recommend using this editor to share an introduction to or an overview of your course and instruct your students to proceed to the first lesson or unit that is available to them. This can be done via text or video. This is also a great place to remind your students to join your private forum or Facebook group (if you have one) or how to reach you if they need help with the course.

Course Description

The Course Description is a short introduction to the course which appears on the student's Dashboard page and in the Course Directory. It's a good idea to succinctly describe the course and what it covers here so customers can determine if the course is a good fit for them and so that students can differentiate it from the other courses they've purchased.

Featured Image

The Featured Image appears on the course page and as a thumbnail on the student's Dashboard page.

To assign a featured image, locate the Featured Media panel on the right column of the screen. On the Featured Image tab, click on the Set featured image link. Choose an image from the media library or upload a new one, then click the Select button.

You may also select a featured video for your course, which is a great way to display a course preview video on the course page. Check out the Learn More About Featured Media support guide for more information on this.

When you have provided all the details above, click the Save Draft button to save your work.


And just like that, your Course Details page is built! Well done. Now all that's left is to build the rest of your course!

Don't worry. We've got your back. With your course's "home page" finished, let's move on to creating your course content, which we'll cover in full in the next guide in the series: Creating a Course: Units and Lessons