Forum Discussion
Using Storyline to build portfolio site
I use Articulate Storyline to build my portfolio site, which is a good way to showcase our skills as learning designers. It looks great and makes our sites have that learning design feel, but the sites are not easy for web crawlers to probe. Any suggestions?
This is my site: https://qint.com/portfolio
Thanks,
Carmel
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I agree that there is an important distinction between designing the experience for a learner and presenting work to someone who may simply be browsing. Your examples have given me some ideas to consider for the human-facing side of the site.
The issue I was originally trying to solve, though, turned out to be slightly different. Changing the Storyline player, removing navigation controls, using thumbnails, or redesigning the landing page can improve the visitor experience, but none of those changes necessarily addresses the underlying web-crawler problem I encountered.
A human visitor can see and interact with the content inside the Storyline player, while Google and other conventional web crawlers may not readily see the dynamically rendered text, references, links, and media behind that experience.
I didn't want to abandon Storyline simply to satisfy the crawler, so I started treating them as two different audiences:
For the human: keep the Storyline experience, interaction, navigation, video, and learning resources.
For the crawler: provide a machine-readable companion layer containing a transcript, references, sitemap, and video metadata.
That led me to build a small PHP utility that I’m calling the Storyline Web Indexer. It extracts selected content from a published Storyline project and generates conventional web resources that search engines can access without having to experience the Storyline player as a learner would.
So I think we're actually looking at two complementary questions: How do we make the experience better for the human visitor, and how do we make the underlying learning content more visible to machines? Improving one doesn't necessarily solve the other.
I’ve now documented the experiment and shared the PHP source code, installation instructions, maintenance workflow, and security considerations on GitHub for anyone who wants to experiment with or improve it:
Storyline Web Indexer:
https://github.com/carmeltse/Ed-Tech-Solutions/tree/main/storyline-web-indexerThanks again for prompting me to think more carefully about the distinction between those two sides of the problem.
Carmel
4 Replies
The first detail I would suggest customising the modern player to remove the controls from your homepage main body that make it appear like a slide deck.
In some examples it becomes nested with a player within a player, one controls the other's timeline.
Stepping back, I would consider the marketing exercise from the learning deliverables. e.g. Two versions, one that is your source master where you may organise everything over the timeline as you see it as an author.
Cutting that down to a marketing product end-user version of only latest/greatest flagship samples. This may be a video guided tour rather than interaction for a person browsing who is not a real learner but just clicking around to try to find what you're promoting.
If you want the breadth of topics limit those to thumbnails with a caption overview of what the highlight of that product was, so you can have a scrolling categorised endless browse for anyone deep diving into your world.
This local creative studio is an example of this approach I have in mind:I like when the page filter is narrow enough (I selected Virtual Reality) and you click into it, there's some useful FAQs visible in an accordian stack below the sample.
https://thesandbox.com.au/portfolio/waso/
My query regarding web crawlers, who do you want to reach, and how do you anticipate they will use a browser to see you on the top page?
Currently, LinkedIn has your name as top result, clicking through, your public profile has the portfolio link visible. So via 2 top page results you get to the portfolio.
Adding portfolio more than your name prompts other pronouns of Carmel to pop up that get anyone further from finding it.
I'd be happy with your LI profile as your link page:https://ca.linkedin.com/in/carmeltse
From that link group with portfolio as 3rd item, consider if the other two should be above or below:
Swiss School of Business and Management
Also considering the product offering of the new Articulate tools, from a superficial outsider perspective, there's a new grand canyon between what we used to make and what anyone can punch into the Frontline product. IF you've seen the Land Before Time, I feel our past portfolio may leave us on the other side of the Great Divide with the dinousaurs that didn't make it.
https://landbeforetime.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Divide
A lot of this is self-reflective and your example just happened to be similar timing, I'm looking at the new product suite and building new onboarding inductions that are 15yrs old, and looking at what will not go mouldy for 1-2yrs.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I agree that there is an important distinction between designing the experience for a learner and presenting work to someone who may simply be browsing. Your examples have given me some ideas to consider for the human-facing side of the site.
The issue I was originally trying to solve, though, turned out to be slightly different. Changing the Storyline player, removing navigation controls, using thumbnails, or redesigning the landing page can improve the visitor experience, but none of those changes necessarily addresses the underlying web-crawler problem I encountered.
A human visitor can see and interact with the content inside the Storyline player, while Google and other conventional web crawlers may not readily see the dynamically rendered text, references, links, and media behind that experience.
I didn't want to abandon Storyline simply to satisfy the crawler, so I started treating them as two different audiences:
For the human: keep the Storyline experience, interaction, navigation, video, and learning resources.
For the crawler: provide a machine-readable companion layer containing a transcript, references, sitemap, and video metadata.
That led me to build a small PHP utility that I’m calling the Storyline Web Indexer. It extracts selected content from a published Storyline project and generates conventional web resources that search engines can access without having to experience the Storyline player as a learner would.
So I think we're actually looking at two complementary questions: How do we make the experience better for the human visitor, and how do we make the underlying learning content more visible to machines? Improving one doesn't necessarily solve the other.
I’ve now documented the experiment and shared the PHP source code, installation instructions, maintenance workflow, and security considerations on GitHub for anyone who wants to experiment with or improve it:
Storyline Web Indexer:
https://github.com/carmeltse/Ed-Tech-Solutions/tree/main/storyline-web-indexerThanks again for prompting me to think more carefully about the distinction between those two sides of the problem.
CarmelThanks Carmel, I definitely was focussed wholly on the portfolio key word, dismissing that part of the web crawlers.
One scenario I would be interested with your tool, if a day time employed SL360 user moonlights as a niche enthusiast/educator, with a suite of SL360 courses to provide to community learners.
It may refer to Kahn Academy pre-requisites recommended for enthusiasts to get the foundation to cover the niche science applications requiring an element of electrical engineering post-requisites.
If someone was on an aggregate engine with agents attempting to answer a query...Perplexity, I want to create home automation using renewable energy sources and energy transformation storage or solid state capacitive discharge type technologies rather than battery technology that degrades. Are there any courses to help?
Then I'd want to see if my SL360 courses on such things with the pre-requisite knowledge and related vocational pathways are ranking with the help of the Storyline Web Indexer:
https://github.com/carmeltse/Ed-Tech-Solutions/tree/main/storyline-web-indexer
😉Thanks. I still have to clean up the script as it is still tagging noindex for some of the content. I'd love to see how it would help other projects.
