How to Learn WordPress

Having decided to learn WordPress, you can always go to WordPress.com, sign up for a free blog, and dive right in. You won’t be jumping in exactly at the deep end since the software provides you with water wings, but you will have to figure things out for yourself, and it should be added that the Gutenberg editor (the block editor) isn’t as intuitive as the people at WordPress think it is. Still, you can get something going by jumping in and pushing buttons blindly.

Other, more advisable, options abound, however, ranging from books (there actually is a WordPress for Dummies available, along with the humorously titled WordPress: the Missing Manual) to live classes, with a number of online options in between. This article goes into those options in some depth, with the goal of helping you to make the best choice as to how to learn WordPress.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an extremely versatile and powerful content management system (CMS) that is behind 43% of the sites on the world wide web. Yes, that’s well over a third of the internet. You can use WordPress for everything from constructing a simple blog to setting up a gigantic online emporium. It’s even being used today as a framework for creating new applications.

WordPress is open-source and free software. That means that the code is accessible to anyone interested, and you can download it without cost. (There are expenses involved in setting up a WordPress site, but WordPress.com makes it possible to create a blog or a simple website without any money changing hands.) Iif you wish to establish an online presence of any size, WordPress can help you.

Learn more about what WordPress is and the benefits of learning to use it.

What Can You Do with WordPress?

WordPress first came to digital life in 2003 as blogging software. It enabled people seeking to establish a voice for themselves on the internet to create blogs without the need for actual coding. As such, WordPress remains extremely popular with bloggers. Indeed, anyone seeking to set up a blog will probably find themselves directed to WordPress for its relative ease of use and wide variety of features that make it possible for lay users to create something “professional” in appearance.

However, 43% of all sites on the web can’t all be blogs, and, indeed, WordPress is currently employed for a great deal more than maintaining ongoing records of what its more casual users had for dinner. WordPress has grown exponentially over the nearly two decades it has been in existence and is used for a variety of purposes today. A range of software plugins allows WordPress to do practically anything. To choose one example from many, the WooCommerce plugin allows the user to turn a WordPress site into a store. As such, WordPress has become the internet’s leading ecommerce platform.

Perhaps the most salient aspect of WordPress is that the software is open-source and free. This has many ramifications, not the least of which is that it opens the software for use as anything a user can imagine. Thus WordPress has expanded beyond blogs and smaller websites and stores into major websites for major companies (zoom.us, indeed.com, and the cryptocurrency site coinmarketcap.com are all powered by WordPress; so is hairwrapsandbrading.au). The software’s server side has most recently begun to be employed as a framework for creating applications. And all these possibilities are within reach of anyone who knows how to make use of the software.

In-Person WordPress Training

If you’re interested in learning to use WordPress (be it personally or professionally), your first impulse may well be to attend an in-person class in a brick-and-mortar school. For some people, learning in a classroom is the only type of learning with which they have any experience, and such people will doubtlessly feel more comfortable with a live teacher in the room and the ability to raise a hand and get immediate attention from the instructor.

While that’s as basic as teaching can get, and little can beat the person-to-person contact you get with a human teacher, there are drawbacks to consider. There’s the inconvenience of getting to a school, since there may not be a school around the corner, and you may well find yourself fighting your way through rush hour traffic. Learning in a classroom can also be distracting for some people.

The availability of in-person classes is clearly going to depend on where you live. If home is the Tri-State Area, Noble Desktop’s midtown Manhattan location can provide you with a variety of WordPress classes, including certificate programs, a bootcamp, and shorter-term classes in how to use WordPress to build yourself a website. Noble Desktop also provides its Classes Near Me tool to locate live WordPress classes in your vicinity, be it anywhere in the United States or even Europe.

Live Online WordPress Training

The most up-close-and-personal way of learning to use WordPress without leaving your house is by taking a live online class. In a sense, it’s the next best thing to attending a class in person. While you’re not actually in the same physical classroom as the teacher when taking a live online class, there are advantages to counterbalance that. Not the least of these is the comfort of being able to learn in your own space. You can take the class from almost anywhere and needn’t even be in the same city from one session to another. It’s a great solution for busy people trying to get a class to fit into their schedules, and it fits right into the lifestyle of the ever-growing number of people who work from home. (One of the two “fathers” of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, set up his company Automattic with nothing but people working remotely. Thus learning WordPress from home definitely gets you into the spirit of the thing.)

There is a large number of schools that teach WordPress classes online. A good place to start researching live online WordPress classes is Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me tool. A click on the above link will bring up a whole list of online classes available to you based on your geographical location. That will likely include major online IT education providers like General Assembly or Noble Desktop, along with some less obvious contenders. As an example, Noble Desktop offers its introductory class in WordPress for complete beginners with no coding background. There are also classes designed for students seeking to integrate their knowledge of HTML with their existing knowledge of WordPress. Beginner online classes are generally brief affairs that run one or two days, although there are also longer-length bootcamps that go into more intermediate topics, such as opening a store using WooCommerce. With all these options, the digital reality is that there is a live online WordPress class that will exactly suit your needs.

Free Online Courses & Tutorials

If signing up for a class (and paying the tuition) seems like more of a commitment than you’re willing to make at this stage in your WordPress education, fear not: in today’s online universe, there is no shortage of ways in which you can get your feet wet for free. That means free online courses and tutorials, some of which are even offered by leading online schools. An example of the breed is the Introduction to WordPress free seminar from Noble Desktop, which takes students from an explanation of how websites work through to the creation and editing of WordPress themes, all without recourse to code. It should prove a well-spent hour and a quarter and will prepare you for a longer class, should you decide to take one.

Other providers of free online WordPress courses include Coursera and Udemy. The latter has offerings such as How to Make a Website Step by Step and a more advanced Learn SEO for WordPress Websites. It also has a selection of mini-lessons available that last around 15 minutes each and teaches single, simple WordPress skills.

Learn more about free WordPress videos and online tutorials.

On-Demand WordPress Classes

By far the most budget-conscious way of learning WordPress is by using an on-demand online option. It is also the most convenient and adaptable way to learn for someone on a busy schedule. The way on-demand learning works is simple: the classes are basically a series of instructional videos that you watch and absorb whenever you like. For those from an earlier generation, on-demand learning is the 21st-century equivalent of getting the book and learning from that.

There are different kinds of on-demand classes, running from free webinars to more elaborate classes with some teacher involvement (like tests that get corrected or some general oversight of students.) The on-demand courses with teacher involvement are obviously one step beyond the just-getting-the-book classes and can be very effective for independent people who prefer to learn on their own.

One thing is certain: there’s no shortage of on-demand WordPress classes available. They come in all flavors, from beginning to advanced, with stops along the way for classes designed for the code-literate and others for people who lack the ability or inclination to code. (If you do want to learn HTML, you’ll have no trouble finding on-demand courses in that as well.) There are on-demand classes for building free WordPress sites (probably the most basic of WordPress operations), and there are more advanced classes in everything from SEO for a WordPress site to how to make money using WooCommerce. You can click on the following link for further information on on-demand WordPress classes; you’ll find no shortage of attractive, affordable, and possibly free options at your fingertips.

Which Learning Method is Right for Me?

Given the many resources available to you when it comes to WordPress classes, you might be a bit unsure as to which learning modality will suit you the best. People learn in different ways (think of how some people learn better hearing instruction in a lecture and others do better by seeing it in a book), and, by the time you’re old enough to read this article, you probably have a good idea of how you’re most apt to learn a new skill. If not, the good news is that you can try on the various pairs of pedagogical shoes before you settle on which one you want to buy.

You also need to consider other personal factors before settling on how you’re going to learn WordPress. If you’re working full-time and have family commitments on top of that, probably the last thing you need is to have to report to a class at a set time, either in-person or even online. That may produce overload, and that may lead you to give up on a skill that may be an important building block for your future. The super-busy might benefit from a self-paced class or video tutorials (or, for the less tech-inclined people out there, just getting a book). They should certainly consider them. On the other hand, people with more flexible schedules are perhaps better suited to an in-person or live online course and to benefit from the structure that comes with that style of learning.

Why Learn WordPress?

Powering as it does over 64% of all sites using a known CMS, WordPress is a versatile software that allows you to create just about any variety of website you can imagine. That could be building an unassuming site with which to introduce yourself to the world, or it could be a multi-tentacled commercial site packed with information and even ecommerce possibilities.

WordPress can therefore be a useful skill for you to possess for your own personal use, or it can become a highly practical adjunct to your professional toolkit. Many companies require staff who can maintain WordPress sites; knowing how the CMS works will enable you to fill such a role. You can also delve deeper into WordPress and be able to create websites, perhaps as a freelancer, which can be a remunerative career with plenty of built-in freedom. Finally, if you really want to become an expert at using the system (and acquire some coding knowledge along the way), you can become a WordPress Developer who can profitably develop new themes and plugins for the system.

Read more about why you should learn WordPress.

Level of Difficulty, Prerequisites, & Cost

To learn to use WordPress on a basic level is not overly difficult. If you want to master fancy plugins and the system’s ecommerce possibilities, you’re going to need to study quite a bit more, but if your goal is simply to create a website, you can grasp the necessary WordPress skills in a matter of hours. WordPress was at least originally designed to be easy to use, even if it has become more complicated as it has acquired more functionality.

You don’t need to know a great deal beforehand to be able to tackle WordPress. You need basic computer skills, of course, and you’ll need to know how to use a word processing program (like Microsoft Word) to understand the Gutenberg editor’s most fundamental operations, but you don’t need any knowledge that would be considered “technical” to get something out of the world’s most popular content management system.

WordPress is available for free at WordPress.org, although, to use it, you will need to invest in a hosting service so there’s a physical computer in which your site can reside. You’ll also need to pay to register your domain name. Those are the only unavoidable expenses, and they will set you back somewhere in the vicinity of $20 per month. You can get something truly for nothing by creating a free blog or site using WordPress.com, although you’re going to outgrow that pretty quickly. To get something more solid out of WordPress.com, you’ll need to purchase a subscription to its services; prices for those begin at $4.00 a month.

Read more about how difficult it is to learn WordPress.

Key Insights

• There are multiple ways to learn WordPress, including in-person classes, live online classes, and self-paced on-demand online classes.
• A considerable number of free online tutorials is also available.
• Different strokes for different folks: people learn in different ways, and only you can determine which learning modality is best suited to the way your brain acquires new information.

Learn WordPress with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

A highly effective way of learning to make the most of WordPress would be to take a class in the subject at Noble Desktop, a leading purveyor of live in-person IT training in New York City. Noble teaches extensively online as well, which puts its classes within reach of anyone in the world with internet access. Noble Desktop prides itself on its hands-on learning model, small class sizes, experienced and talented instructors, and a free retake option that makes it possible to cement or refresh your knowledge of what you’ve learned within the space of a year. Noble Desktop offers a wide variety of WordPress classes and bootcamps, one of which is sure to further your goals in using the CMS.

Noble Desktop’s WordPress Bootcamp is designed for students with a background in HTML and CSS who are seeking to learn how to use the system whilst bringing their knowledge of coding to the WordPress table as well. The course of study runs for three weeks, two nights a week for three hours a session, and takes WordPress novices through to customizing a website in ways that aren’t possible if you are limited to communicating in English with the software.

While WordPress can be used to create impressive websites, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in WordPress’ philosophy. For those interested in learning about WordPress in tandem with other tools for front end web development, Noble Desktop also offers its students a Front End Web Development Certificate program that teaches not only WordPress but also HTML, CSS, and the language so essential to the creation of interactive and dynamic websites, JavaScript. Or, if the design aspects of website creation interest you as well, Noble offers a Web Design Certificate program that teaches, in addition to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WordPress, the underlying principles of UI (user interface) design.