Wānaka WordPress Course

It is hard for small organisations, especially non-for-profits to not succumb to skipping to different technology instead of investing in learning and supporting existing.

We have seen this with WordPress, a organisation has a site built with it, decides change is necessary and is wooed away by a designer who is more at home in SquareSpace or Wix. Often they realise the move results in more expense and even more investment in learning a whole new system, especially when the next designer requires yet another move.

WordPress is not ideal, but it is a whole lot better than people think once you get to know it. It is also often cheaper and is definitely more aligned ethically and geographically if hosted locally with small organisation s who “Just want a web presence”.

To help locally we are going to run a course on how to build a basic site and grow skills in WP, the Block Editor is now good enough IMHO that it is worth the learning curve.

Here is our proposed course outline:

• How websites and domain names are related
• Where websites live and how basic costs
• What is WordPress and why it is cool
• Create a site and what is in the main toolbar
• Creating your first page!
• Different content types and why they exist
• Create your first Post!
• Themes and strategy around how to manage them
• How a website can drive your social media while retaining your control and content ownership (publish once, propagate widely)
• Plugins and extending from the basics