Professional WordPress Training Tips

Teaching your team to be knowledgeable in WordPress CMS is a great idea. Not only does it allow your organisation to be completely independent from external Webmasters[footnote] Someone who updates your website by uploading new content to it [/footnote], but it also means that you can get the most out of your website by understanding its power and potential.

When it comes to training your team in WordPress, you have a few options:

• Get 1-2-1 professional WordPress training. Hire the professional services of a WordPress specialist agency (such as ourselves) to offer you and your team training as part of the handover process after a web design build.
• Enrol your team members on an online or local WordPress training course. We often run WordPress Clinics locally in Brighton that are ideal for training on specific problems you might encounter. For online WordPress training courses, we recommend Treehouse’s WordPress for website owners and WP101.
  • Treehouse’s WordPress for website owners course offers paid training videos with a free trial. Their videos cover adding and editing content, working with media in WordPress, WordPress community management, and owning a WordPress website long term.
  • WP101 offers paid training videos with free samples. They offer videos on how to use WordPress’ CMS and understanding the Yoast SEO plugin.
• Encourage your team to train themselves using the vast WordPress training resources online. There are plenty of fantastic WordPress training resources out there allow your team to train at their own pace. We have a wide range of WordPress training resources on our blog, and we’re adding to it every week. We also suggest reading WP Beginner, a free blog packed full of WordPress training articles and videos, for beginners to advanced users.

About our WordPress Training Workshop

At Angry Creative, we can provide professional WordPress training to you in the form of a WordPress Training Workshop. This allows us to extensively train you and your team on the powerful WordPress CMS so that you can have full control over the content on your website. As well as offering training on new builds, we can provide training for new members of your team who may need to update your website and can deliver training refreshers for your established team members.

Our WordPress Training Workshop allows you and your team to have a 1-2-1 training session with our specialised WordPress experts.

We provide our WordPress training workshops either face-to-face (at our offices or yours), over the phone or via Skype conference call – whichever you prefer. As every WordPress site is different, with different theme and plugin configurations, we strongly recommend bespoke WordPress training specifically for your site.

How to get the most from our WordPress Training Workshop:

• Bring along questions. Take a look at your new website before our workshop to see what features and functions you would most like to have control over. We will always give you all the training on the basics, but there may be certain advanced features that you would like to be able to update, such as a changing image slider for example.
• More the merrier. Having more than one person attending initial training ensures knowledge isn’t held by just one person, who could leave your organisation unexpectedly.
• Sharing is caring. Encourage team dissemination. Once one or two people in your organisation are trained in WordPress, encourage them to share with others in the team.

How to internally train your team in WordPress:

Establish user access

Set up your team members as WordPress admin users with the appropriate access level. We’ve outlined the 5 roles, who they’re best suited to and what they can access below:

Webmaster roles:

• Administrator – the most powerful role that has access to your website management controls. Only a very few of your most trusted employees should be assigned this role.
• Editor – for your trusted content managers. Editors have full access to your website’s content and can write, edit or delete posts and pages.

Blog writer roles:

• Author – for trusted members of your team who regularly write their own blog posts on your company’s blog. Authors can write, publish, edit and delete their own blog posts.
• Contributor – for new or junior team members who need their blog posts approved before posting. Contributors can write blog posts, but are unable to publish them themselves.
• Subscriber – this role has the fewest controls, and you may find you will never need to assign users to this role because of how limited it is. It only allows team members to comment on published blog posts.

Once you’ve assigned everyone their roles, show your team how to edit their profile.

Organise your website updating process

Set-up processes and editorial systems make sure everyone knows their responsibilities and how to use the site and all its features.

Produce a style guide

This can be a draft post or page within your WordPress website that documents all the different styles and formats you want the team to use. To create this, look at how we’ve already styled your pages and blog posts, and write a guide to follow those styles. We recommend this task is best left to a highly-trained WordPress website manager.

Update the staging site of your website to reduce risk

This relates to plugin and widget changes. Make sure all content changes you make (updating product descriptions, blog posts and pages) are made to the live version of your website. If you do update your staging site, remember to tell your web developers as they may overwrite your work in the staging website when doing development work.

Duplicate and merge draft content

We recommend installing the duplicate and merge plugin so you can edit a duplication of a page or post without editing the original. Once you’re happy with your changes, you can then easily merge your content back into the original when happy.