A popular service since I introduced them many years ago, my WordPress training courses have trained people of all abilities and technical knowledge levels on the various components of the WordPress content management system.
I’ve trained people from bespoke one-on-one tutoring to small group sessions for company departments. I’ve also had the pleasure to run my WordPress courses for clients in Newcastle, Gateshead and County Durham, as even staff at larger institutions such as the University of Edinburgh.
Last week saw me run yet another WordPress training course for a client here in Newcastle upon Tyne, and taking the client through the content gave me a chance to think about how the courses have evolved over time. Initially, the WordPress training courses covered the very fundamental elements of WordPress, largely related to formatting content, and looking at WordPress’ key features.
This is all very well and good, but our newer courses now think more about an organisation’s requirements, and how we can help that organisation
Traditional WordPress training courses
Traditional WordPress training courses tend to cover standard features of WordPress, including:
- Adding and editing page and post content in WordPress
- Formatting content, from bold and italic formatting to internal and external links, headers, lists and tables
- Managing user accounts and post comments in WordPress
- Planning your website’s hierarchy and using menus in WordPress
- Customising your pages and posts by changing page templates, adding widgets, and more
This is a great introduction to the fundamentals of WordPress, but if your website is designed as a promotional tool for your business or organisation, I felt like something was missing.
How I improved our WordPress courses
Our simplest improvement was asking our training course delegates what they wanted to know to help achieve their aims for the website. These ranged from “feeling confident in adding new content” (something I aim for everyone attending my WordPress training) to “generating more sales enquiries”, and this latter point lead to a big change in focus for later sessions.
As such, we’ve adapted the courses over the years to introduce an introduction to search engine optimisation for WordPress component which has proved very popular with website managers. The SEO content provides extra insight in to how search engines look at a website, and guidance on best practice for structuring your page content.
If you’d like to talk about a WordPress training course and getting you up to speed on optimising content in your site, please do get in touch.