Selling a course on Ghost, where half the site is deliberately unreadable

The default assumption behind most widget greetings is that the visitor is deciding whether to buy. On a Ghost course site the launcher is also sitting on lesson pages, where the visitor has already bought and wants their certificate, their progress or their login fixed.

Write the greeting so it says what it can do and what it cannot see, in one line, before anybody asks. A learner who is told at the outset that this answers questions about access, the curriculum and the policies, and cannot see their account, asks a different and more answerable question than one who finds out after typing a paragraph.

Make the handover the obvious next step in the same message. The productive pattern for a course is that the assistant explains how a thing works in general, then takes the name and the signup email and passes it on, so the reply that follows is an answer rather than a request for details.

Access length, what happens when access ends, whether an extension can be bought, whether later additions are included, the cancellation window and how a refund is requested. Put all of it on one page on the site, even if the authoritative version is also inside your checkout.

This is worth doing whether or not you run an assistant, because these terms produce more disputes after purchase than anything else. But it is the difference here between an assistant that ends a refund conversation accurately in one message and one that has to hand every single one of them to a person.

Index the compliant version rather than the sales page wording. Where a country gives a buyer a statutory cancellation right on a distance sale, that sits above whatever your page says, and an assistant repeating a friendlier marketing line creates the dispute instead of preventing it.

The onboarding sequence usually contains the best writing a course provider produces: how the platform works, what to do in week one, what the common technical failures are and how to fix them. None of it is readable by anything, because it went out as email.

Turn the durable parts into a public help page. It answers the questions your inbox already receives, it survives a learner deleting the welcome message, and it gives the assistant something to say on a lesson page other than an apology.

A learner opens a lesson, sees the launcher, and asks how far through the course they are. It is a completely reasonable question in that context, and the assistant cannot see the answer, because it reads pages and documents and a learner's position is neither.

The failure is what it reaches for instead. With a detailed curriculum indexed and a caution level left low, the closest matching material is the module list, so the reply is a confident description of where module four sits in the course. It reads like an answer to the question that was asked. The learner takes it as one.

Two settings fix it and both are one line of work. Raise the caution level so a question about the learner's own account falls below the threshold rather than reaching for the syllabus, and write the refusal to say explicitly that it cannot see accounts or progress, then ask for the signup email so a person can. The gated half of the site is invisible for good reasons, and the assistant has to say so rather than fill the gap.