WordPress Video Tutorials

There is an abundance of video tutorials of all sorts available on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, and WordPress is one of the many topics covered. This article will take you through this world of video tutorials and give you some advice on how to select an online resource that will help you 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.

Why Are Video Tutorials Helpful When Learning WordPress?

A cursory glance at the offerings on YouTube will reveal that there are online tutorials available in every aspect of WordPress, from absolutely basic blogging skills all the way through to courses in PHP designed purely for WordPress development. You will probably be able to locate a video with a teacher you find sympathetic and who goes at a pace that matches your brain’s learning style.

One of the many helpful aspects of a video tutorial is that you can back it up endlessly to catch that point you keep missing. Visual learning has very much replaced the old-school system of getting a book and figuring things out from there. The staggering success of YouTube—the way it has completely integrated itself into our culture since its inception in 2005—shows that people derive considerable value from its offerings, for news, for entertainment, and for learning how to reset a circuit breaker. It’s probably the first place people turn to for information and has become a perhaps even more trusted repository of universal knowledge than its slightly older written rival, Wikipedia.

There’s another factor to bear in mind with regard to online video tutorials: the price is right. In a day and age when things at Dollar Tree cost $1.25, you can’t beat free for a price tag.

Types of WordPress Videos

Of course, anyone can make a video tutorial and post it on YouTube: there’s no quality control, and even well-meaning people may still give you false information in their videos. (Anyone who’s ever followed a YouTube recipe and ended up with a bowl of glop in place of a swiss meringue buttercream will understand that all too well.) For this reason, you’re going to want to choose a tutorial that is most probably reliable. You might, therefore, concentrate on videos from providers known for their reliability, providers like established schools that offer free online classes. Noble Desktop, for instance, provides an introduction to WordPress tutorial that gets students started on their way in the software for the amazing price of…nothing. If you are looking for something more advanced, Noble also offers a free online tutorial for developers who wish to learn how to construct custom WordPress themes. Many other well-known schools also provide free online tutorials; you’ll find yourself confronted by a profusion of possibilities if you run a cursory search for such videos on YouTube.

That’s by no means to say that there aren’t attention-worthy videos available from individuals who create online tutorials. The range of classes here is indeed bewildering, and you’ll be able to move all the way from WordPress fundamentals all the way through to advanced classes in plugin and theme development, with room for a helpful stopover learning HTML, a highly useful skill that becomes necessary as you progress in your knowledge of WordPress. There are even “complete” WordPress courses to be found. You’ll probably be able to pick up valuable tips and tricks from some of these videos as well. And, of course, there’s no arguing with the price.

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.

How Difficult is It to Learn WordPress?

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.

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.