Which WordPress Training Format Is Right for Me?

There is more than one way to learn WordPress. The different ways of learning how to use the CMS will suit different people more or less well. If you intend to learn to use WordPress, there are several essential factors you’ll have to consider to come up with the means of learning the system that is best suited to you. This article evaluates the various options open to you and will help you to make the best possible choice between them.

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.

Training Formats for WordPress

There are essentially four different training formats for WordPress. Your choice is going to be between in-person training, live online training, the kinds of courses that are available online for free, and “asynchronous” courses that are self-paced and a more dependably curated variation on the theme of online tutorials. The latter occasionally include a human teacher who checks in on your progress from time to time.

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

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.

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.

Other options for free online courses include a complete introduction to WordPress from WordPress Academy that runs for over eight hours and teaches students to set up their own websites. It also dips into more advanced topics such as SEO, getting started with ecommerce, and even a small taste of how to use PHP to develop themes. You’ll also find among the many offerings at WordPress Guru a class in building an ecommerce website. If you’ve got a site up and running and want it to run faster, LinkedIn Learning teaches a class in WordPress performance optimization.

On-Demand Classes

If your impulse when you have to learn something is to get the book and study at your own pace, you should consider an on-demand online class. Also called asynchronous (as opposed to a class with a live teacher operating synchronously with the students) learning, this method furnishes students with a series of video lessons that they can follow at their own pace, and sometimes with a human being to oversee students’ progress through the course. Self-starters will find this an effective means of learning (it is also considerably more affordable than a live class). More information about on-demand WordPress classes is to be had simply by clicking the preceding link.

Comparison of WordPress Training Formats

There is a number of different ways of learning WordPress, just as there are multiple reasons for wanting to use the CMS. There are even two different incarnations of the system, WordPress.org and WordPress.com. WordPress.com could very well meet your needs so that you don’t need to bother with hosting and WordPress.org, but don’t forget that migrating your site from the .com side to the .org one when you outgrow the .com platform isn’t overly difficult.

The first question you need to ask yourself is what, exactly, are your goals when it comes to using WordPress? Are you seeking to learn it for professional purposes? If so, to what extent do you want to know how to use the software: does your job just require that you be able to make posts and use the Gutenberg editor, or do you have your eyes on becoming more than that, perhaps someone reasonably expert with the software who can use it to create sophisticated websites for clients or manage an ecommerce store? Or do you want to go the full distance and become a WordPress Developer with the coding knowledge that goes with that? Or are you just looking to become a relatively casual user who wants to know how to launch and maintain a personal blog or how to create an individual site to establish a web presence rather than to sell an inventory of ten thousand SKUs?

Your needs are going to dictate the length of the course you’re going to need to take and what that course is going to have to cover. For someone who will only need to know how to create a simple site and make posts to it, a brief class will often suffice. There are classes that can give you the most basic knowledge in the space of a day, although that’s perhaps not quite enough time to figure out all the intricacies of the Gutenberg block editor. On the other hand, you’re also not going to need weeks upon weeks of study to reach that level of accomplishment. Even if you decide to learn HTML (and to learn how to apply HTML to WordPress), you can be up to speed in under a week.

Making the leap to the next level – to becoming an expert user who can tinker extensively with HTML and build elaborate websites – is going to be time-consuming. Some sources estimate the time required (that would be class time and real-world experience) at anywhere from six months to a year. And, if you wish to become a WordPress Developer, you can add probably another year of classwork and required experience to that, perhaps even more time than that if you need to pick up PHP, the language in which WordPress is written.

Having resolved the how long?, you’ll next have to tackle the how? part of the question.

Going back to your experiences in kindergarten, the teaching paradigm with which you are best acquainted is most likely in-person learning, where the teacher is in the same room as the students, and able to react to them and answer questions immediately. A classroom will doubtlessly be the most familiar place for you to learn a new skill, and the reality is that little compares with the opportunity to learn from a live teacher.

There is, however, an eminently viable alternative to learning in person: the live online class. You might not have a school nearby or the means to commute, or you may just have decided that you’ve sat in uncomfortable plastic chairs in a classroom for the last time in your life. Thanks to the internet, however, there is a way to bring the in-person class to you in a space of your own choosing. You get the same real-time connection with the teacher (you can even share your screen with the instructor), and you don’t have to sit next to someone wearing poisonous cologne. There is a lot to be said in favor of this approach to learning, and countless people have benefitted from it over the past 20 years.

Your third main option for learning WordPress would be the on-demand or asynchronous class, where you view (or read) lessons at your own pace but without being able to interact with an instructor, although some schools do include a teacher who checks in on you periodically as part of their on-demand classes. As a teaching modality goes, this one is not too different from buying the book and teaching yourself, albeit with a few more bells and whistles. Some people do well from this form of learning, and it is usually considerably more affordable than a live class, but it does require a considerable degree of motivation to keep yourself on a steady study schedule so you can complete the course.

And finally, here are free online tutorials that cost even less than the on-demand classes and which are readily available to anyone. The advantages to these are obvious, but our species doesn’t always take things that come free too seriously, and you may not stick with the free tutorials the way you would with a class for which you shelled out some of your hard-earned money. The free tutorial does have its uses, however: it’s a great way to get your feet wet and to assess whether you have any aptitude for WordPress. Learning a few basics beforehand will also stand you in good stead when you begin your formal class.

Is it Possible to Teach Yourself WordPress?

The answer here is yes, to a certain extent. The plethora of how-to videos available on YouTube or through purchase shows that there are many people out there who at least think they can learn a skill (from making swiss meringue buttercream to being a cybersecurity professional) on their own. You can definitely put together a basic WordPress site using online learning materials. If you like teaching yourself things, you’ll likely be able to succeed in satisfying your basic WordPress needs through the self-taught approach.

On the other hand, there are probably limits to how far you can get purely on your own. The Gutenberg editor, while it makes a lot of things much simpler to do, is a great deal more complicated to use than the old classic editor, and maneuvering through the profusion of available blocks may not be the easiest thing to learn from an online video. Then there are other things, such as plugins and themes for which you may appreciate a guiding hand and, most of all, the chance to ask questions. And, if you’ve decided to tackle WordPress from the WordPress.org side, odds are you’ll need help even sooner than if you’re letting WordPress.com show you around.

If you have goals beyond a basic site or blog, the reality is that, unless you’re a confirmed autodidact and have a knack for understanding tech subjects, you’re almost certainly going to be better off in a course with a live teacher that will enable you to ask questions and receive the guidance that you won’t get from a series of online tutorials. Moreover, some of the latter may even lead you down the garden path and put any amount of wrong ideas into your head. For the serious WordPress student, one who wants to take WordPress skills into the workplace, little in the long run is going to replace a live class.

How to Decide the Best Way to Learn WordPress

Choosing the right teaching modality for learning WordPress depends to a large degree on you, what you want to learn, and, yes, what’s in your wallet.

To get started, or to get a blog or a modest website off the ground, you may be able to get by with introductory videos on YouTube, the more reliable ones over at WordPress.com, or, maybe even better, a free introductory class that will guide you on your first few steps in using the CMS. You can produce something basic but attractive on WordPress without an enormous amount of knowledge since, at its roots, WordPress was designed to put blogging into the hands of those with ideas but not a lot of technological ken.

If you want a fancier website or if you want to use WordPress professionally, you’ll probably profit most from attending a class or even one of the briefer bootcamps. These will give you a more solid grounding in the basics of using WordPress, along with training in some more advanced features that can be extremely useful to users of this type.

Finally, if you have your eyes on making a career of WordPress (say as a WordPress or Front End Developer), you’re probably going to be best served by one of the more extended certificate programs. These will teach you how to use the system plus additional skills, such as HTML, that will help you get started on a new career. Knowing how to launch your own blog about your latest finds at Dollar Tree isn’t going to be nearly enough if you’re to make a living from WordPress. For that, you’re going to need a significant amount of education, although the good news is that such an education is readily available through online and in-person classes from a large number of established and reputable schools. Moreover, you’ll even find that many schools have affordable payment plans that put this type of education within just about anyone’s reach. (Some longer programs even have payment plans that don’t require you to pay anything until you get an in-field job.)

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.