Can you teach me WordPress?

“Can you teach me WordPress”

I get that question a lot.

The answer is a resounding “Yes”.

However, this question is so much bigger than it first appears to be.

It is so broad that it is impossible to answer without first finding out what you actually want to do..

So when someone asks “Can you teach me WordPress”, firstly I need to find out what they actually mean. Questions may include:

• What is your purpose for this. Are you just curious, want to do a bit yourself or want to become an expert??
• What related skills do you already have.
• What are your expectations for the training?
• What outcome do you want from the training?

So why so many questions?

Building any website from scratch requires a bunch of related skills. A full set of skills to make a WordPress site look great and work well include;

1. Understanding of core WordPress concepts.
2. JavaScript & jQuery programming – to create functionality
3. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – to style the pages and elements
4. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) – to structure the page and elements
5. Graphic Design – To create appealing styles & look & feel
6. Copywriting – to create good copy that reads well and is appealing
7. Image/Photo optimisation – to ensure photos look good and also load quickly
8. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – to ensure page content works well to be found in Google etc.
9. Performance Optimisation – technologies to ensure pages load quickly
10. Web Hosting – chosing proper hosting to ensure pages load quickly, even with a lot of visitors.

To be an expert in every one of these is simply not possible. To get all of these skills requires a team of experts.

Sounds too hard, right?

Well, it doesn’t have to be. Depending on what type of website you want to work on, and what you actually want to do, you probably won’t  need all of these skills.

Fortunately, these days there are excellent plugins (extensions) and page builders that take care of most of the hard stuff for you.

If you just want to be able to create and edit content while keeping it looking professional and consistent, using a good page builder like Elementor may be all you need to get good at. For anything else, just pass it back to your WordPress support experts for help. Personally, I work with a lot of websites were the site owners create as much content as they can, and only contact us if something doesn’t look right or is broken. We help to fix these issues, they then happily continue on creating content.

It really is only when the default widgets and settings don’t quite look or work as you want them to that you may need additional skills, like JavaScript, CSS and HTML. So unless you absolutely want to become an expert, it makes more sense to get help with this when you need it.

Skills you will absolutely need include: Image/Photo optimisation and writing content for S.E.O. Oversized photos is the number 1 reason for slow web pages. Poorly written content that does not assist with S.E.O means your pages are unlikely to get found in Google Searches. Or if they do, the descriptions are incorrect. If you are creating content, any training you get must cover these skills.

In Summary:

Yes, we can teach you WordPress. The training you need depends on the skills you already have and the outcomes you want.

Your training may be as complex as becoming an expert, or as simple as learning to create content with a good page builder.

Either way, at WPGet we will work with you to provide customised training you can actually benefit from.