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Easily Create an Education Site with Multiple Instructors

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Today I want to thank Marcus Couch of the Scene Zine Podcast at www.thescenezine.com for sending in this link. It’s kind of a membership site tool, but its really designed for people looking to educate.

prfessorThe site is www.prfessor.com (that’s not a typo) and for $49 bucks a month you get a hosted, turn-key solution for anyone looking to create courses, and charge money (or not ) for them. You can literally create your University, training center, or certification program in about a half hour.

Set up unlimited courses, for unlimited students and create tests and exams for the course. Set up payments easily with paypal or use your authorize.net account. You can set up multiple “programs” (kind of like different school in colleges).

You can be the dean and the teacher, or recruit professors and give them a whatever percent of the classes they teach. You can create intelligent quizzes in a snap.

You have 1 gig of file storage, and 30 gigs of transfer per month. If you have a bunch of videos, I’m not sure if 1 gig would last. I wonder if using something like the S3 Media player would allow you to copy and paste code so storage wouldn’t be a concern.

So what’s the catch? Well if I had one thing to complain it’s that the default theme of the site is kind of plain. It’s not ugly, but it’s not “wow.” Are you stuck? No. You can upload your logo to help. If you need more help to update the look of the website you are going to put out some cash to have the look customized (to the tune of about $1000). My thought is I will build the site and once I get some students I will pay to have it customized.

It really looks easy as the tools automatically create your course catalog, FAQ page, contact us page, and instructor recruiter page and you can drop in a logo and brand your site in seconds. It’s only $49 bucks a month.

Check it out at prfessor.com


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Create Customized WordPress Themes in Minutes

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Today I have a video to show off a software that I am really excited about. I’ve wanted a software like this for years, and I’m so glad this exists. It’s called Artisteer, and it allows you to create a wordpress theme from scratch in minutes.

You can customize every aspect of your worpdress theme. Choose your colors, your layout, the location of items like categories, etc, your header, your buttons, your menus, and on and on and on…

In making a video for the podcast, I typically try to keep them under 5 minutes. This is an almost impossible feat as this software has so many features (but I gave it a shot). The best part of this software is its price. You can download a trial version for free. If you like (and how can you not if you work in WordPress), you can buy the “home” version for $49. There is also standard version that regularly sells for $149 (NOTE: I ACCIDENTALLY SAY $129 in the video it’s normally $149) and you can buy that version (during this introductory offer for $99.95 The standard version will have the ability to output to Joomla, and drupal (in the future), it also has a library of textures and glares, and you can export to CodeCharge Studio. If you’re not working in WordPress it also exports as XHTML+CSS (so you can work with Dreamweaver, etc).

According to their FAQ, when it comes to selling themes created with this product, “Yes, as long as you do not include Artisteer photo objects within your header (Header -> Foreground Photo), as those objects are licensed from a 3rd party only for your own use. You may re-distribute any other designs you create, including those with Artisteer header background photos (Header -> Background) and your own photo objects.”

Watch the video, and for more information go to www.artisteer.com


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