We pride ourselves on producing high quality websites that fully conform to the highest web standards. Our sites are accessible and search engine friendly, making sure that all our sites have the best possible chance of succeeding where so many others fail.
Even though WordPress is very popular and, to fairly technical minded people, easy to use there is still a bit of a learning curve to get the most out of all the features. Now, I’m not talking about designing and building new WordPress themes or plugins – I mean blogging, writing pages, uploading images and making sure the content works.
A lot of people would be reading that and shaking their head: “WordPress is SO easy! How can anyone not understand how it works?”. But to somebody not used to any kind of computer software, let alone a content management system (CMS), it can be pretty daunting.
Over the last few years we’ve worked with a number of clients who have all wanted a CMS on their site, they don’t like the idea of paying us more money just to copy and paste text into their site – which is fair enough, it’s not something we really want to be doing either! When we’ve looked at all the various CMS available, something has stood out – if you design the theme correctly, WordPress is by far the easiest for most people to pick up straight away. Expression Engine is very good as is Drupal and Joomla but they always feel a bit over complicated.
But, even with something as simple as WordPress, we still need to train people how to use the features to best show off their site, keep the site search engine optimised and make sure the blog or news is regularly updated.
We’ve always found a simple face-to-face training session has worked best. It’s all very well showing YouTube videos to people or forcing them to read long winded PDFs but it’s just not the same as being in the same room and teaching them to work it on their own computer.
For starters we concentrate on what is WordPress and the difference between Posts and Pages. And from there we move straight onto adding content. After 30 minutes even the least technically minded people can write a new post, add and image and link off to another website. It might sound pretty basic but there’s a lot of people who wouldn’t know where to start otherwise.
If you’re using WordPress for more than just a blog, or planning a new website, it can very soon become a very large and difficult to understand piece of software. All those pages, categories, posts and tags can become quite overwhelming. If you need help with your WordPress site – we can probably help! We have designed and built bespoke themes, edited plugins and helped train users of several of our sites to make the most out of the WordPress cms.