In today’s episode, we will talk about how to teach someone how to use WordPress, right here on YourWebsiteEngineer podcast, episode No. 245.

Back to another episode of YourWebsiteEngineer podcast. My name is Dustin. Today, I’m excited to be here with you because we will be talking about how we can teach somebody how to use WordPress. We’ll get to that in just a second. I’ve got two quick announcements, a plugin to share, and then we’ll get right into that section.

One of the cool things that happened in the WordPress news within the last week or so is the WordPress plugin directory, the plugin repository that I speak so highly about.

There’s over 39,000 plugins and it surpassed 1,000,000,000 total downloads. The articles came from WPTavern.com, and it was written on August 10th so it was just a couple days ago – actually yesterday, as I’m recording this.

It had reached the 1,000,029,069 total downloads at that time. There is right now 39,383 plugins in the WordPress repository. This is all as of yesterday afternoon.

The cool thing is you can look at the number of downloads over the past years, and it’s just really kind of neat to see how much it has grown since March of 2006.

In 2006, when it started in March, it had 191,000 downloads, and then it jumped to 2,000,000 in 2007.

In 2008, it went to 15,000,000, then to 49,000,000, to 72,000,000 to 108,000,000, 141,000,000, 182,000,000, 242,000,000 last year.

In the first half – January through August – it’s been 186,000,000 downloads. You can really see where the growth of WordPress has happened. It’s really taken off. It looks like it’s almost doubling, more than doubling, each year for the last few years, which is really, really cool.

It’s really exciting to see that this many people are excited and interested about downloading plugins from the WordPress repository. It took nine years to get to a billion and I’m wondering if it’ll take about – I don’t know how many years it’s gonna take to get to two billion. Maybe it’ll only take four or five years instead of nine years if it’s doubling and increasing in size. That’s something to keep an eye on for the next few years – to see how many downloads that’s happening.

Another thing that I saw on WPTavern that I thought might be a note for those who are interested in traveling to different WordPress events.

I’ve seen a few of these pop up throughout the years. There’s a CaboPress. There is other names that use the word “press” in the title. There’s PressPublish, which is an automatic event.

The new one that’s out there is called SkiPress, and it’s a weeklong excursion in the French Alps. So if you’re interest in heading to France, or you live in France and you’re interested in taking some time to meet with other WordPress enthusiasts and to do some skiing: November 21 through the 28th.

It is just a big long week of WordPress and skiing in the French Alps. It can hold up to 15 people and it’s going to cost €350, and that includes some meals and whatnot. That is something you wanna check out. It’s in the show notes for episode No. 245.

The other thing that I wanna share with you today in the “Is there a plugin for that?” is there’s a new social icons widget that’s out there. This one is actually just called “Social Icons Widget” and it is a widget that takes a simple, extendable approach to displaying your links from your social media profiles on your WordPress site.

The purpose of the plugin is, basically, to strip away all of the complexities. It has the ability for you to choose one of several different types of images, whether they’re square, or circle, or whatnot. Then, it links them to your social profiles.

You put all that in the widget and it just displays either in your footer, your sidebar – wherever you can put a widget, you can put that.

I’m recommending this just for the fact that you can see some different social share icons. If you’re interested in seeing if this one is perfect for you, you’ve got small images and large images and it looks like they’re all square images, from what the screenshots show in the repository.

You can find this by searching for “social icon widget” in the WordPress repository, or find a link in the show notes for this as well.

Today, I wanted to just spend a little bit of time here talking about how we explain WordPress to other people. I get this question a lot.

When people ask me what I do, I have to explain what WordPress is and how it works. What I do is support WordPress.com users, which is kind of a challenge in itself.

Then there’s also times when – back in the day, a few years ago, when I was developing for clients, one of my biggest things that I loved doing was I’d build a site for a client and then I would teach them how to use their website just because I didn’t wanna have to maintain all of these sites. I wanted to build it and be done with the project.

So what I did – and I’ll talk about this a little bit as we go through this podcast episode – one of the things that I always did was I set up a one hour call at the end of the project. Once WordPress was all set up, it was done, their website was done – then we had a one hour call and I just kind of walked through the different pieces of their website, showed them how to use it, how to make changes, modifications, things like that.

The basis of my training changed dramatically whether I was teaching somebody who had never used WordPress before or if somebody had used WordPress a lot and they were just upgrading their site and making it look much, much better, or whatever the case may be.

It was really hard to create a customized “this is a one-step solution that works well for everyone.” I never really did that, but here are some things that we can talk about and some of the ways that I kind of broke my video training – my visual training – up for these customers, or clients.

One hour was guaranteed as part of it, and then if they needed more hours it was at my normal rate. I forget the technology at the time, but it was something like a Google Hangout – one of those online video-sharing services where they could see my screen, and then I was logged into their dashboard.

I was clicking and telling them how to do different things as I went through them. I also then recorded it so I gave them a copy later, just uploaded it to – I forget how I did it, I might have even just embedded it into their own site so they could watch it at their leisure, or whatever the case may be.

Again, this was a few years ago when I did this so I kind of forget all of the little intricacies of what I did, but I know that I gave them documentation with all of the login information and a brief overview of how WordPress works. Then, we did the video consulting call as well.

Here’s kind of how I broke things down to share with them how WordPress works and things like that.

When you first get started, you wanna just tell them a little bit about WordPress is and how it works. I would be very detailed about how this is how you can change all the text and the content that appears on your website.

I also made sure that they never had access to changing themes or anything like that. I told them that would never be a problem. If you need to make a customization to a theme or if there was something that you needed that you couldn’t actually customize, then that would be something that I could either build into a widget area, or it would have to be something that a developer would do. I wanted to make sure they knew the differences about what could be controlled with WordPress and what could not be controlled with WordPress.

Another thing that I wanted to make sure is that they knew the difference between what their WordPress was, their self-hosted site, versus their WordPress.com site.

Even though some people had WordPress.com sites set up to hook up Jetpack and get all that configured and whatnot, I wanted to make sure they knew the differences between the two. Especially in the fact that some people, if they had questions, it would just – “Oh, it’s WordPress and I’ll just go to WordPress.com and then ask questions there.”

I know that, as an experienced happiness engineer, we get questions every day. It’s maybe 30 percent of the time people are asking for help and assistance when it’s a self-hosted site. There’s a very hard line that people don’t understand. It is confusing: WordPress.org, WordPress.com, self-hosted versus hosted, whatever it is, it makes it very, very confusing.

So I always made sure that they knew the difference between those. I also wanted to give people some examples. This sometimes happened before I even said that I was gonna use WordPress, or whatever. “Hey, there’s some of the cool things that people can do with WordPress.” “This is why WordPress is so popular, because it has the ability to add plugins and backups” and all this kind of stuff, just kind of a high-level overview. We’re not talking hours upon hours explaining all this stuff.

Remember, all this stuff that we’re gonna talk about in the next ten minutes or so, I’m trying to teach them in a one-hour long presentation and try to give them the entire grasp of what WordPress is and how it works.

Then, I also explained why WordPress is easy and how you can make modifications to things that you can change, to things that you won’t have access to change, and how you can find resources to actually find other WordPress support – or, if you’re wanting to install a plugin, how to do that. I briefly discuss those in the overview of why WordPress is such a popular platform and why it is a good thing that they are launching their website on WordPress.

Then, what I like to do is I normally will break the WordPress dashboard into the different sections. We’ll first briefly, before we even really do anything, what I normally do, I would log in to the back end and show them. They’d be looking at the dashboard and then I would move my mouse around or highlight with arrows if I was doing this in a print documentation. I would talk about the different sections of WordPress.

We’d first talk about logging in, then I’d explain that in a little bit, but I’d say “First, you need to log in and then this is the page you’re gonna see first and foremost, called the dashboard,” then show how you can actually move those pieces around inside the dashboard.

All those settings and those panels on that front page, you can move them around so you can see exactly what you wanna see on that main page when you first log in. We’d talk about the dashboard; that’s all the things that you can add, the things that you can subtract, and just get that all set up. This is where you’re gonna land every time that you come into your site.

Sometimes it’s also good when you’re on the dashboard page to show them where notifications would be if there is an update available, especially a WordPress core update. That’s kind of nice to show, but you don’t always see that when it comes to logging in for WordPress, like if you have your site all updated and whatnot. You might just highlight, “Hey, in this area you may see an update notice. This is how you would do an update and handle update stuff like that.”

Also, within WordPress, what I like to do is I like to show that “welcome” box right at the very beginning because that actually helps people click through and learn how to use WordPress on their own, kind of a refresher, as you will.

What you can actually do is you can log in as them and if you’re working on the site, you can actually dismiss that box. Then if you go up to the “screen options” tab, you can actually bring that box back up right before you log in with that user so then they can see how everything is setup.

After the dashboard, we talk a little bit about posts, then pages, media library, all that kind of stuff, just a high-level overview.

Posts are basically your blog content or your news content or whatever type of content they’re using on their site. Then pages, this is your static content. This is your about page, this is your contact page, stuff like that.

The media library is where all of your media is stored. That’s where, when you upload an image, it’s all gonna appear in there. There’s no way to organize it. It just automatically organizes itself. It’s all in there. A lot of people ask, “Well, can I organize it and put them in buckets and folders?” No, it’s just all there. Show them how to search for an image if you know the name of the image, and how you can search and how you can find the information about that image itself. “How big is the image?” and things like that.

Then, we’ll talk about the comments just a little bit. Depends on if the site has comments turned on or turned off. That’s another thing to think about. Even if they have a blog, if they don’t have a blog section, then most of the time you jut might skim right over the comment area.

Talk a little bit about appearance and all the stuff that’s in there: how to set up the menus, the customizer, any extra theme options that are hiding in there. We’ll talk about that, just kind of a brief-level over view.

Plugins, we talk about that, kind of navigate them just a little bit of the way into, “Here’s the plugins that we’re using on your site,” and things along those lines.

Not get real detailed analysis right now; we’re just kind of high-level overview. These are the things that are in that left-hand sidebar. We talk about the users, where all the users would be, the tools. Normally, I say that there’s not much in the tools section that you need.

Then, the settings area – you go in and show them some of the settings: general settings, writing, reading, the media options, permalinks, all that kind of stuff is in there – if there’s any plugins that have menu items down that column as well. I know OptinMonster and Pretty Link Lite, some of the ones that are on my site are there. I would just explain those in a high-level overview.

Now one thing my friend Kyle Maurer talks about – and we did a webinar about this a few months ago – is to make the WordPress dashboard easier is maybe you wanna take some of this information, you wanna take out some of these sections and just hide them if the user is not using them.

There’s some plugins and some tools out there that you can do to kind of hide those menu items, but if it is a purely static website, a five-page website without a blog, you’d probably want to hide the “posts” area because that’s not necessary.

You might wanna hide the comments section if they’re not using comments. You can hide the tools section or the users section. All of these different things you can hide so that it won’t get confused and there’s not more things for them to learn that they’re not actually going to use. That’s something to think about.

Once a high-level overview is done, normally what I would do is I would log out of WordPress and then take them to their WordPress login page.

I’ve talked in previous episodes about how to create that custom page, so if it’s a custom page I’d show them that, obviously, because that’s gonna be their login page.

If they don’t have a custom page, then I’ll show them where that page is and how to get to it. The big thing is a lot of people are like, “Well, how do I get to my dashboard?” You wanna make sure that they’re not going to WordPress.com to try to log in. They wanna go to yoursite.com/wp.login.php or wp-admin, whatever the case may be.

Or, if you’ve used and set up better WP security or iThemes security, you wanna make sure that they know their custom login URL, whether it’s like Dustin’sCustomLogin, whatever that is so they can get to that place. Tell them that they need to bookmark that right now, or put that in their browser, somewhere that they will remember that’s how they log in to their site.

Once we’ve logged out, we’ll show them how to log in, tell them what their username and password is. Make sure that’s really clear, they’ve written that down, they’ve saved that. Then, how to retrieve a password if you lose it, and that is linked to the email address.

If they go in and they put in the email address that you tell them, “This is what we’ve registered under, then here’s the link that you click on to go ahead and find and reset that password.” That’s what I do right after that.

Once they’re logged in, now we kind of fill in more details. We go in and we try to add some more by deep diving into these different sections. We would go into the post area and then highlight the different areas in the post section, like here’s the editor, here’s the difference between HTML and VisualEditor, here’s how you schedule a post.

If you want to publish a post to come out next week, you can go ahead and auto schedule it and it will come out at the exact right time. I’d probably highlight in that case, too, to make sure that their general settings and their time zone is correct, otherwise that messes a few things up. That’s the one piece of the puzzle there.

Then, we talk about categories and tags and featured images. All of that stuff can be talked about when we go through and talk about the post section. We can say the excerpt and how the “read more” tag works, things along those lines. These are just things that, off the top of my head, are easy to me or easy to somebody that’s used WordPress for quite some time, but, when you really think about it, it’s like, “Wow, this is not the easiest, most intuitive thing to do.”

You wanna show them the screen options page inside the post section so they can turn on and turn off different things. If they’re not planning on using any tags for anything, you can just turn that section off so they don’t see it. If the comments are disabled, you can turn off the comments. All of that stuff can be toggled inside the post settings.

Then, I’d probably jump right from posts to pages and show how it’s very, very similar. The main differences are you can have different parent pages. If you wanna keep them more organized with an “about” page and then maybe “about the team” and about each individual, those can be organized that way.

I’d share and show how the different templates would work, whether you have maybe a sidebar left or sidebar right. Maybe it’s a full page or a front page. All those templates that are built into the WordPress, I make sure that I go over that stuff as well.

What else will we talk about? We talk about that “all posts” and “all pages” landing page that you can go in and you can do some quick edits if you needed to change things.

Talk about how to delete pages, how to recover them from the trash, how to 100 percent delete them by removing them from the trash, all that kind of stuff can be talked about. I feel that most people will be using that section of their site the most. They’ll be going in and making tweaks to pages or adding post content, stuff like that.

Another thing that you really want to make sure they have a firm grasp on is the customizer. The customizer is kind of this new thing they’re rolling out with WordPress and with WordPress 4.3, the new version that’s coming out next week, hopefully. They have a lot more features that are being added to this customizer.

Essentially, they should be able to customize everything they need right inside the customizer: the widgets, the menus, all that kind of stuff. Really highlight how those pieces work and how all of that is functioning and the pieces – how it live-updates; you can see a preview right there within the customizer, which is really nice.

Also, talk a little bit about the plugin section. Talk about how you can add new ones, whether it’s from uploading from a place that you download them or a place where you purchase a premium plugin like a BackupBuddy or something like that.

Also, show them how to find them in the WordPress repository. Again, in this section it would really depend on how much are you planning on giving the client the access to their site. Are you allowing them to upload plugins or are you locking that piece down – you’re going to manage everything that they need. Depending on that client relationship that you have, that’s a thing to think about as well.

We just wanna deep dive and really highlight the pieces of the puzzle that they are going to need to use or need to know where it is. That’s something to think about.

Once we do the broad level overview – and this can go anywhere from five minutes to 45 minutes or an entire hour, or whatever you think is going to be best. It depends on the competence level, the technical ability of your client or your friend that you’re teaching how to use WordPress. It depends on how well you think they’re picking it up.

Another thing that may help, too, is you let them do it and you explain what they should be doing so they actually move the mouse. That could be done as well, instead of screen sharing and I’m doing everything. I let them pull it up and then I watch them work on their site, then I show them different places to do that.

Sometimes I would do 40 minutes of me showing them things and then give them control and say, “Okay, how would you do this, this, and this?” Then of course document the whole thing, video record everything so they have that, so they can take a look.

Depending on how technical you wanna get and how much detail you wanted to get, you could probably even put timestamps of when you learned how to do this, this, this, and this inside the video. So at four minutes we learned how to add a new post, and at eight minutes we learned how to do whatever. That may help the client figure out and get into WordPress a little bit easier, get into the things that they need.

The last piece of the puzzle is to create that visual document that the client or your friend can review later. Something you can think about is you can create a generic guide right off the bat. Say, “This is how you learn WordPress,” and maybe it’s a ten page guide that just briefly overviews “this is a standard WordPress installation, this is how I would go through and actually learn how to – here’s a post, and page, and categories, and media, and all that kind of stuff.”

Then, you can add an addendum to that and “Here’s some of the special features that your website has.” You always send them the WordPress site, and then you just have to create a shorter version for their specific site.

You could do the video, liked I talk about earlier. You could show them exactly how to do things, have them do it. Do it all on video so they know exactly how to do things. There’s WP user manuals or WP video manuals that you can install – that’s a plugin that they can actually watch documentation inside their WordPress site for more information. That’s another option that you can do.

If you are documenting it via Word, I highly recommend keeping paragraphs very short and making sure that there’s a lot of screenshots, and the screenshots have annotations in them. I know that this is kind of annoying when WordPress updates their UI every few years. That is a bummer that you have to go and update all the screenshots, but that’s something to think about to make sure that it’s the most easy for somebody to consume and understand and learn.

Let’s see what else we wanna talk about. We wanna also make sure that we’re using the proper WordPress terminology; especially whatever labels are being used within WordPress. It’s pretty easy for us to say, “post” and “page,” “category,” “media library,” stuff like that. Just make sure you’re using WordPress lingo, and if you’re using something that may be confusing, make sure that you define that and let them know exactly what that means.

When you’re explaining plugins, they may not have any clue or any grasp of what a plugin is. What you could say is, “Oh, with this plugin, it’s an extra piece of code that’s added to a WordPress site that gives it the functionality to do whatever.” Make sure that you’re explaining the different pieces of WordPress. That’s another thing as well.

Then, you might also want to highlight where they can find help. Their ultimate goal, depending on the way that you set up your client relationship – if it was me, I wanted them to do everything. I was there for consulting and adding custom plugins or customizing their theme and stuff like that, but I didn’t wanna have to teach them and walk them through for weeks and months on end on how to use WordPress.

So you may wanna highlight where they can find help, whether that be the “help” tab inside of WordPress, or maybe it’s the WordPress forums, the Codex and WP101, WPBeginner.com, some of those websites that are out there that 100 percent focus on helping people learn WordPress.

I know that WordPress is easy but, as we talked about for the last 15 minutes, it’s not that super easy for somebody that hasn’t used it. I see it every single day. WordPress is nice, it works really well, and it is easy for somebody that’s used it for a little while and figured out how things work.

Especially how sometimes themes will have a featured front page template that will automatically pull in content from all different places and then you have to really explain, “Oh, well these testimonials are coming from the testimonial area, this custom post site that’s built into this theme. It’s pulling form here, and here, and here, and it’s all dynamic.”

I know that it’s more challenging than it actually is, and I think for the most part if you are helping somebody, a client per se, somebody that you’ve already set up their site, it’s going to be a lot easier for them to understand how to use WordPress without having to customize their theme.

If you are trying to help somebody for the very first time set up WordPress and set up their theme, your training and your documentation is going to be much different because setting up themes are its own animal in itself.

Every theme is different and every theme has to be customized in different ways. I know this for a fact because the 300 plus plugins or the 300 plus themes that are on WordPress.com, they are all different and they are all configured differently.

Even for me, if somebody asked me a question on how to set up the Oxygen theme, or whatever, I actually have to open the demo and take a look and see where all the information is being pulled. It really takes a few minutes to try to figure out how that’s done.

Hopefully, if you’ve already set up the website then all they have to do is manage the content behind the scenes. That’s going to be much, much easier for somebody to do.

That’s pretty much, in a nutshell, how I would describe and share WordPress with other people.

Okay, to recap: we’re gonna tell people how, in a broad level overview from looking at the dashboard how all the different pieces work – what pages, post, media library, all that kind of stuff is – pretty much all just the menu items that come down that left hand menu.

We’re just gonna talk about those, we’ll review logging in and logging out. We wanna make sure that they know how to log in and log out, especially if you’re doing it with them on video. You wanna make sure that they’re doing that right then and there.

Then, we’ll fill in more details. We’ll deep dive into posts and pages and plugins and settings and all those different things. Show them this is where the information is, this is how to change it or modify it if necessary. Then, we wanna create a visual document that people can review later and make sure that they know and understand how they can use their WordPress site.

All right, well I know that was a mouthful and there’s a lot of things to talk about when it comes to WordPress training. I think if you just take a little bit of time and teach clients or friends how to use WordPress, it’s going to save you a lot of headaches in the end. One hour here can save you hundreds of emails back and forth later.

That’s what I wanna share with you today. I found great success with this when I was consulting and building websites for clients, so I wanted to pass on the information to you guys.

That’s all I’ve got for you. Hopefully, next week we can talk about WordPress 4.3. Until then, take care. Bye bye.