What is a Category and how can I use them?

Categories are used to segment your Products into related areas of interest or specialties so that they can be easily searched. Administrators can add Categories and reveal them to the learners as Interest Categories. Learners can select Interest Categories and rank them based on their level of interest. If a Recommended Product Widget is used on any of the Elevate pages, the system will populate this widget with Products that matches the leaners interests.

Recategorizing and Site Organization

As learning needs change, industries change, and your content grows, updating the taxonomy on your Elevate LMS is an important best practice. Often, clients find that this is necessary within the first two years as they are growing their online learning content. The recategorizing of content can be done in an approachable manner with the following steps.

To begin:

Your site has likely been live for a while and you have a foundation of set categories, products, and pages. The first step we recommend is to audit your products. This will help to filter out which products you can close for registration and decrease the list of products you need to recategorize. 

Second, by answering a few of the questions below you can narrow down a list of which categories you will need to set up as a part of your new tagging system. 

• What content is offered on your site? Make a list of everything.
• What is the priority of each offering? Is there a hierarchy of what is most important vs. more supplemental offerings? Take your initial list and rewrite it with this in mind.
• What content is needed to generate revenue, if anything?
• Who is coming to your site? Consider all audiences and possible users. 
• Make a few use cases: Consider you are someone looking for something specific. How long does it take you to find that item now? What can we do to simplify navigation and decrease confusion or the search time for the content?
• What is the best way to describe the first thing the person sees when they come to the site, what would that be? Second, third, fourth? 

Once you have your finalized list of categories and product types (optional), you can now begin to add those new ones onto the LMS. If needed, you can hide the new categories and product types from end user view and unhide them when you are done with this process of updating.

When you are ready to update your products with the new categories or product types, you can do so by:

1. Going into the basic section of each product, clicking on the tab for Category/Product Type, and updating there
2. Going into Product -> Categories, selecting a category, clicking the edit icon, and checking/unchecking items in the dropdown for Included Products 
3. Using the Mass Edit Product tool

When you have fully updated the products, hide the old categories and product types and show the new ones. The end user will see the new categories and product types to search by these on their profile, catalog, etc.

Remember that the Menu Group feature in Elevate LMS is a great way to offer quick links for your users to access content based on a category, topic, interest area, etc.

You can also add widgets that will link to a page you have created to display products that will display based on a specific category if you would like. This can be a great way to promote some of your new categories. And do not forget to also update other related content such as files in the file collections.