This is the first WonderThemes guest blog post by UK web designer Laura Kalbag. If you fancy yourself a WordPress guru and want to post in this blog just drop us a line.

Teaching WordPress to clients is big business. There are books, training courses and pricey online guides out there, but what if your client is on a budget?

I just like to help my clients hit the ground running with the basics. Often you’ll find that the WordPress admin is so well (and consistently!) designed that once your client has learnt how to do the basics, they can pick the rest up with little help.

So what are the basics?

If you’re making use of some of the brilliant new features of WordPress, as well as the old goodies, then you’ll be likely to teach your clients the following points. I’ve provided a checklist below with some great text and video tutorials to help out you and your clients.

Pages, the text editor and adding images

Checklist

  1. How to write appropriate page titles and where those titles will show in the theme.
  2. How page permalinks are derived from the page title, and how to edit the permalink.
  3. The difference between using the Visual and HTML editing panes.
  4. How the Tiny MCE buttons help format your text content.
  5. The differences between ‘Save Draft’, ‘Preview’, ‘Publish’ and ‘Update’ actions in the Publish pane.
  6. How to insert an image and how captions are shown in the theme.
  7. How image alignment works, and how it may differ from what it shown in the Visual editor.

WordPress Pages admin

Resources

Posts, categories and tags

Checklist

  1. How posts are different from pages in having single post and archive views.
  2. How to use categories on posts and how category archives work.
  3. How to use tags on posts and how tag archives and tag clouds work.

WordPress Posts admin

Resources

Widget management

Checklist

  1. How widgets can be added to widget areas and where those widget areas are shown in the theme.
  2. What each of the default widgets (Archives, Calendar, Categories, Custom Menu, Links, Meta, Pages, Recent Comments, Recent Posts, RSS, Search, Tag Cloud and Text) does and where they are most appropriately used.
  3. How to use the Inactive Widgets area to save the settings of the widgets that aren’t in use.
  4. What happens in the theme when there are no widgets in the widget areas.

WordPress Widgets admin

Resources

Menus

Checklist

  1. How to add menu items to menus created by the theme.
  2. How to create new menus to use with the Custom Menu widget.
  3. How to drag menu items within menus to reorder them or make them into child and parent items.

WordPress Menus admin

Resources

Comments and comment moderation

Checklist

  1. How to change the discussion settings and how they affect user comments.
  2. How to activate the Akismet plugin to help fight comment spam and how to obtain an Akismet API key.
  3. How to Approve, Unapprove, Mark as Spam and Trash comments, and how these actions differ.
  4. How to get a Gravatar and get it to work with the user’s WordPress-registered email address.

WordPress Comments admin

Resources

Why Bother?

By setting out to teach your clients WordPress when setting them up with a site, you’re instantly going to minimise future requests for support. If, like me, you’re a designer and developer who would rather spend time creating new stuff rather than answering support tickets, taking this kind of approach to educating your clients is bound to have a positive effect on your business too. Your clients will appreciate the time taken to thoroughly ensure they understand WordPress and hopefully recommend you to their friends!

General Resources

  • WordPress.tv

    A brilliant source of videos related to WordPress. The quality is high and the How-To category is incredibly useful.

  • The WordPress.org Codex

    The first go-to for text guides to using WordPress. Some can be a out of date, so be wary, but there are a lot of gems in there.

  • WordPress Editing Guide

    A great work-in-progress editing guide on Google Docs from Mike Ellis