Coming Course: WordPress for Website Owners

Hi Folks!

Since launching our Plugin Course a few weeks ago we've finished filming our next course, WordPress for Website Owners. While at WordCamp Europe I heard from a lot of developers and agencies that they would like to be able to offset support and training to their clients who want to power their own sites. This also helps site owners who update content but don't need to know about adding functionality with plugins or changing the look of sites with themes.

With around 20 videos at an average of a few minutes each, it will be an easy walkthrough the first time and quick reference for the future.

Below you can get a sneak peak of what we will cover:

Project Description

In this project we will cover all of the basics of getting a site, managing it, and growing your community. Throughout the course you will have the opportunity to work through our live example WordPress site to practice and demonstrate what you learn.

Upon completion of the course you will feel comfortable owning your WordPress site so you can focus more on your goals for having it.

Getting a WordPress Site

Hosting companies that support WordPress make it easy to install and get up and running with a WordPress in just a few clicks. While you can setup a site on your own, more commonly, web site owners work with a WordPress developer to design and build their sites.

Over the course of the next few videos we will examine the pros and cons of the most common ways of getting a WordPress site.

Working with a Developer

A great thing about working with a WordPress site is that a huge community of talented and available WordPress developers exist around the world. When working with a developer you will likely work together on organizing your content, designing the look and feel of the site and then building it so you can easily edit your content. We will also discuss things you want to know about finding and hiring your developer.

Setting Up Your Own Site

If you have some technological skills or have worked with WordPress or other content management systems in the past you could easily setup your own WordPress site. You will be able to make pages and posts without and configuration and you can even begin explore themes to change the look of your site and plugins to add extra features.

Setting Up Your Own Site

If you have some technological skills or have worked with WordPress or other content management systems in the past you could easily setup your own WordPress site. You will be able to make pages and posts without and configuration and you can even begin explore themes to change the look of your site and plugins to add extra features.

Setting Up Your Own Site If you have some technological skills or have worked with WordPress or other content management systems in the past you could easily setup your own WordPress site. You will be able to make pages and posts without and configuration and you can even begin explore themes to change the look of your site and plugins to add extra features.

Adding and Editing Content

Content lies at the heart of your website. Learning how to manage posts, pages and custom posts will likely take up the majority of your time while logged into WordPress. The process is quite simple and once you learn the admin navigation and basic options for content fields you’ll be all set.

Content Strategy

Before you can start adding content to your WordPress site you will need to figure out what content you will have and how to best organize it for users. From there you can create your navigation and sitemap. Finally you will want to outline a schedule of what content you will need to update when. Very rarely do WordPress sites not update their content at some point.

Content Strategy

Before you can start adding content to your WordPress site you will need to figure out what content you will have and how to best organize it for users. From there you can create your navigation and sitemap. Finally you will want to outline a schedule of what content you will need to update when. Very rarely do WordPress sites not update their content at some point.

Post, Pages and Custom Post Types

You can think of posts as blog posts or news items. Posts generally have listing pages where you all of the posts are listed with links to read the full post. Pages are referred to as static content, meaning they do not update as often and normally have links to the content from the main navigation, rather than from listing pages like posts. When your content doesn’t fit exactly into either of these formats, you can setup custom post types. Good examples of custom post types include ecommerce items or images for a slideshow.

Publish Page Overview

While different types of content exist in WordPress, the publish and edit pages for all content look fairly similar. They have have a title, some basic content fields and options for publishing. In this video we will take a look at a number of different setups. It’s not important you know what each field does, but rather that you know where fields for editing your content appear and in general what they look like.

Custom Post Types and Fields

When you have custom types of content in WordPress you will see slightly different publish and edit pages than when dealing with posts and pages.  The different variations of custom types of content in all WordPress sites is immense.  In this video we will look at some common examples to help you feel comfortable with whatever your content looks like.

Categories and Tags

Categories are a very general way of grouping content.  A site will not usually have more than a dozen categories.  Content may have a lot of different tags assigned to it.  In this video we will go over how to work with categories and tags for the blog on our site.

__Menus in WordPress_

Unless the developer has specifically setup your site to add new pages to the main navigation you will likely have to use WordPress’s menu section to determine what pages display in your navigation. Depending on your WordPress theme you may have more than one menu on your site. In this video you will learn how to update menus on your WordPress site.

Widgets in WordPress

Widgets are custom pieces of content that often appear in sidebars and footers. They can do anything from list pages and categories to show recent tweets or blog posts. Without access to widgets you will likely be limited to only editing the main body copy on your site.

Working with Media in WordPress

Media makes as much if not more of an impact on visitors as text. Often WordPress sites have images or videos as the primary type of content being displayed. WordPress lets you upload media to your site as well as embed or link to media hosted elsewhere, like on YouTube or Pinterest. WordPress also offers some built in tools for editing images that we will look at.

Adding Media from the Content Editor

Most commonly on a site you will use the Media Upload option on the publish page, above the content field to upload your images, customize if necessary and then place into the page. During the process you also have options to add meta data to the images such as alt attributes.

Photo Galleries

WordPress has a great built in feature to create photo galleries.  All you have to do is upload your images, determine what order you want them, and then select whether clicking on an image should go to a full page or just show the image.  In this video we’ll go over how to create and configure a photo gallery.

WordPress Community Management

The people who visitor and interact with your site are your community. There is a lot you can do to encourage a happy and interactive community around your WordPress site. In this section we will look at the technical capabilities WordPress has for allowing users to interact on your site. We will also look at how to setup website analytics on your site to better understand your community behavior.

Identifying Your WordPress Community

Your WordPress community may include just a few visitors coming read about your services or tens of thousands of users interacting with you and other visitors via forms and forums. When you’re running a WordPress site, it’s important you identify who your community is, what their needs are, and how you can work to meet them.

Comments in WordPress

WordPress gives you the option out of the box to let visitors leave comments on posts and pages. As a website owner you have the ability to moderate comments or close them completely. In this video we will go over the basic options for setting up and moderating comments.

Sharing on Social Networks

A number of reasons exist for why WordPress sites would want to integrate with other social platforms. Commonly people do so to easily tweet posts, like pages or pin images. In this video we go over a few best practices for sharing your content on social networks.

Forms on Your WordPress Site

WordPress does not come with the ability out of the box to add forms to a website. If your website has contact forms or other types of forms, it is likely using a form plugin. In this video we will point out a few of the most popular form plugins and how to use them to manage the forms and the emails they send.

Owning a WordPress Site Long Term

When you own a website, it’s important to think about how the site will serve you and your community in the long term. To do this you want to have clear goals for your site that you can monitor and assess over time. You will also want to keep the content fresh and the look and feel up to date. Finally, you will want to set yourself up so that when you don’t understand something related to WordPress you know where to turn to find the answer yourself or get help from the right WordPress professional.

Setting and Meeting Goals

When you make a website for a business you should have clearly defined goals for how you would like the website to help your business. Owning a successful website means learning how to set these goals, meet them, and then reassess new goals for the future.

Adding New Features to Your Site

As your site grows and your needs and goals expand you will at some point want to add new features on to your site. In this video we will take a look at some common examples of new features and discuss when it’s appropriate to try something yourself or when it’s better to hire a WordPress professional. If you can accomplish the new features with an easy to setup and use plugin, you may be able to take on the project yourself.

Redesigning a WordPress Site

Good websites stay updated with relevant content and maintain a fresh look and feel. After a while you may find that you’re ready to redesign your site, meaning do a complete overhaul of the sites look and feel. Sometimes this goes along with a rebranding and sometimes it’s just because things look outdated. In this video we’ll give some suggestions for redesigning your website.

Learning More About WordPress

The more you work with WordPress, the more you will find there is to know and is to do. In addition to watching more WordPress videos on Treehouse there are a number of other things you could be doing to continue your WordPress education. Some of these things involve reading or watching videos, while others involve meeting actual people who work with WordPress as website owners or website builders.

Alright, so that's it! Expect the course out on the roadmap in the next week or so and live on the site after the holidays, mid January. Yay!