Eduma Review - How It Helped Me Build My Own Learning Platform From Scratch Without Coding

Introduction

When I first decided I wanted to start my own online learning platform, I knew next to nothing about website design, development or online education platforms. As someone without any coding experience or web design skills, the prospect of building a fully-functional learning management system (LMS) from scratch seemed incredibly daunting.

That's when I discovered Eduma, a premium WordPress theme specifically designed for educational websites. In this review, I will share my experience using Eduma to build my own learning platform over the past 6 months without any coding required.

What is Eduma?

Before getting started with Eduma, I first wanted to understand exactly what it was and how it functioned. Eduma is a WordPress theme developed by ThimPress, one of the largest WordPress developers on ThemeForest. According to the product page on ThemeForest, Eduma is a "Multi purpose Modern Clean and Creative WordPress theme suitable for education, school, college, institute, university, online learning and training."

Key Features

Some of the key features that stood out to me about Eduma include:

Built-in Learning Management System (LMS)

Eduma is built around the powerful LearnPress plugin, one of the most popular LMS plugins for WordPress. This gave me a full-featured LMS right out of the box with features like course management, quizzes, assignments, and more.

Extensive Demos and Customization

Eduma includes over 20 pre-built website demos that can be imported with one click to get started quickly. It also has an intuitive theme customizer that allows customizing colors, fonts, headers, footers and more without code.

Mobile Compatibility

With its responsive design, Eduma looks great on any device from desktops to mobile. The theme is fully optimized for smartphone and tablet use.

Regular Free Updates

The developers release major free updates at least a few times per year which add new features, improvements and bug fixes.

Getting Started with Eduma

With the key features identified, I was ready to purchase Eduma and begin building my learning platform. The pricing on ThemeForest offered both a regular lifetime license for $69 as well as an extended license option. Since this would be for a commercial, for-profit business, I opted for the extended license at $3,200, which allowed reselling access to courses.

Installing Eduma was simple - I downloaded the theme files, uploaded them to my self-hosted WordPress site and activated the theme. The next step was to import one of the 20+ pre-built demos included with Eduma using the one-click Demo Importer tool. This automatically populated my site with sample pages, posts, widgets and menus saving me hours of initial setup work.

Importing Demo Content

I reviewed the various demo options and selected one for an online educational site similar to what I envisioned. In just a few clicks, the importer had filled my site with starting content crafted by the theme's developers.

Activating LearnPress and Adding Courses

I then turned my focus to the LMS functionality. From the admin plugins page, I installed and activated LearnPress, Eduma's bundled LMS plugin. Within LearnPress, I was able to easily add new courses, lessons, quizzes and course catalogs without any coding required.

Customizing the Design

While the imported demo content and LMS features gave me a jumpstart, I still needed to customize the design and branding to match my business. Eduma's built-in customizer allowed modifying colors, fonts, headers and more visually without touching code. I was able to fully redesign my site to match my company's visual identity in just a couple hours.

Going Live and Seeing Results

With the basic setup, sample courses and customized design in place, my learning platform was ready to launch. I started marketing the site to my email list and existing students. Within the first month of going live:

• I gained over 500 registered users on the site
• 75 users had enrolled in paid courses, generating $3,000 in revenue
• Student engagement metrics like time spent and pages viewed were strong

The automated course tracking features within LearnPress also made it easy to see what content was resonating and where users needed more support. Taking feedback, I continued adding new courses, lessons and programs over subsequent months.

Expanding Course Catalog and Revenue

By the 6 month mark, my site had:

• Surpassed 2,000 total users
• 350+ paid course enrollments
• Generated over $20,000 in revenue

I was averaging 2-3 new paid course launches per month which continued driving steady growth. While building out more advanced site features remains on my roadmap, I've been hyper-focused on content creation which fuels the majority of my revenue. After less than a year, the platform is now fully self-sustaining financially.

Ease of Use and Support

One of the most impressive aspects of using Eduma has been how little technical knowledge is required. As someone lacking web design experience, the theme has empowered me to build a very sophisticated learning platform intuitively without a learning curve.

Should any issues arise, the developers provide priority support directly for 6 months with any purchase which I've found extremely useful on a few occasions while customizing advanced theme features. Being able to get rapid responses from the creators themselves offers invaluable peace of mind when running a business-critical site.

Ongoing Customizations

While the out-of-box features covered 90% of the requirements for my LMS, I had some additional specific needs as my business scaled:

Integrations

I wanted to offer a single sign-on from my existing student database as well as integrate payments through an existing merchant account. Thankfully Eduma follows best practices allowing it to integrate seamlessly with these systems through custom plugins built by affiliate developers.

Streamlined Administration

As my course catalog grew to 100+ offerings, easier filtering and searching within the admin became crucial. Editing global site settings also needed streamlining for our growing team. Addressing this helped optimize internal workflows tremendously.

Mobile App

With many students now accessing courses primarily from phones, developing a dedicated mobile app greatly enhanced their experience. A third-party plugin built specifically for Eduma allowed publishing courses natively to iOS and Android.

Overall, Eduma's open architecture and active community meant any customization needs could usually be addressed through either built-in options or separate plugins without expensive developers - a real advantage for any bootstrapped business owner.

Conclusion

In summing up my experience, I can unequivocally say that choosing Eduma was the best decision I could have made. It empowered me to build my learning platform from concept to profitable reality on my own without any coding skills or deep technical knowledge.

The market-leading LMS features combined with robust customization capabilities have allowed my platform to seamlessly scale alongside my growing business. As I look toward continuously expanding course offerings globally, I'm confident Eduma provides a future-proof foundation to reliably support that growth for years to come.

For any individual or organization looking to launch an online learning platform, I would wholeheartedly recommend leveraging Eduma. The value it delivers is unmatched for the price. Best of all, you can live within days instead of months thanks to its extensive pre-built content and intuitive design. By automating complex educational functionality out of the box, Eduma truly empowers anyone to successfully build their learning business.

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