WordPress for Beginners – Master WordPress Quickly

If you are new to Udemy, please read this first.

Wordpress for Beginners will teach you how to use Wordpress to create professional looking sites, quickly and easily.  This video looks at a few reasons why Wordpress is the best platform, and one you can trust.

Congratulations on making the decision to learn Wordpress. This introductory video will explain who I am, and why Wordpress is such a great platform to use for building a website.

Did you know there are actually two types of Wordpress?  One is a free service that limits what you can do on your site, and the other is an installable script that gives you total freedom.  This lecture shows you both, and explains why you should be using the latter.

As you work through this course, you may spot differences between what I am showing you, and what you are seeing on your own computer.  This lecture explains why that is the case, and why you should not worry about it.

Before you start this course, I would love to know whether you've had any problems trying to learn Wordpress in the past.  What were the roadblocks that prevented you from succeeding?  Was it just too technical?  Was the learning curve too steep?  Let me know.

A list of Wordpress terms and definitions that you will hear while working with Wordpress.

This lecture will show you the two options you have for installing Wordpress.  For those that want to learn Wordpress without having the expense of a web host, you can install Wordpress on your own computer.  

If you want a live website, then you'll need a domain name and web host.   We'll cover that too.

This short quiz makes sure you understand a couple of very important points, before you move on with the rest of the course.

This section of the course is not required by everyone, so please read this short explanation.

When you install Wordpress on your own computer, some plugins may not play nicely, as many are developed for an online environment.  Please read this lecture to find out more.

This lecture shows you how to install WordPress on your computer using a free tool called Local by Flywheel.

This lecture explains the other options you have for installing WordPress on your own computer.

A test to see if you understand Local By Flywheel and what it does.

Anyone on this course that needs help installing Wordpress can get free access to my Installing Wordpress Course on Udemy.

This tutorial shows how I go about finding and registering a domain name. In this lecture, I mention my free Installation course. It is no longer free in Udemy, but you can still get it for free by checking out the final bonus lecture in this course.

This lecture shows you how to install Wordpress on a web host, using a separate registrar for managing the domain name.

Test your knowledge about installing WordPress on a web host.

A look around the Wordpress Dashboard.

A look at the pre-installed demo content and how to get rid of it.

When WordPress 5.0 was released on 6th December 2018, it got rid of the WYSIWYG editor in favour of a page builder style editor. However, you can still use the older "Classic" editor if you prefer.  This video shows you how you can install the old editor and use either one when editing content. 

Let's take a look at the WYSIWYG Editor.

This lecture looks at the basics of the Gutenberg Editor that was introduced in Wordpress 5.0. 

The Media Library allows you to easily manage your images, videos and other media types in one central location.

Testing your knowledge from this section of the course.

If you have problems with animations showing on your site, please read this.

This lecture introduces the principles of Gutenberg.

A quick look at the Gutenberg interface.

This lecture looks at blocks, and how you can access all of their features.

Let's build a post using Gutenberg blocks.

This lecture looks at inserting images into your pages, and getting text to correctly wrap around those images.

This lecture looks at the highly versatile Cover block.

This lecture looks at using columns for horizontal control of elements.

This lecture looks at creating and using reusable blocks

Third-party developers are creating blocks for Gutenberg.  This lecture shows how you can find them.

I encourage you to read the frequently asked questions on a web page.  They'll answer some of your questions about Gutenberg.

Testing your knowledge of the Gutenberg editor.

What is a Gravatar, why are they important and how can you set one up?

Let's set up the author profile on our site.

Let's take a quick look at the General Settings in WordPress.

Let's look at the writing settings in WordPress.

When you add a new piece of content to your site, it's nice to tell the world about these new pieces of content. In this video we'll look at how we can do that.

This video goes through the Reading Settings in the Dashboard, setting them up as we go.

This video goes through the Discussion Settings in the Dashboard, setting them up as we go.

This tutorial offers some advice on dealing with Wordpress comments

This video looks at the Permalink settings, and how to use them for maximum SEO benefit.

Wordpress 4.9.6. was a privacy and maintenance release.  One new feature was designed to help websites become GDPR compliant.  This tutorial shows you how to add a privacy policy using the template Wordpress provide to make sure you have everything covered.

How do you make your website mobile-friendly? The answer is very simple...

An Introduction to Wordpress Themes

This video shows you how to add, delete and activate plugins.

Please note that "WordPress SEO by Yoast" is now just "Yoast SEO" and their logo as changed to a traffic light.

If you buy a plugin, it will come as a zip file. You can easily install these zip files in the Dashboard, and this video shows you how.

An Introduction to Wordpress Widgets, this lecture looks at "widgetized areas", and how you can add content in the form of widgets to these areas.

Testing your understanding and knowledge of this section of the course.

Wordpress offer two main ways to add content to a site. Posts and pages. In this lecture, we'll look at how posts differ from pages.

This lecture looks at the Gutenberg editor options when creating WordPress Pages.

This lecture looks at the Gutenberg editor options when creating WordPress Posts.

A look at how to use categories to organize your posts.

Tags can be used to further classify posts, and make it easier for your visitors to find things.

This lecture summarizes the use of categories and tags.

This video looks at excerpts and why they are so important to your site.

This lecture looks at the importance of featured images to make your site look more professional.

This lecture shows you how to schedule a post to be published in the future, and mentions a plugin that can help turbo drive your scheduling.

To increase page download times, you should be optimizing the images you use in your content.  This tutorial looks at image optimization the right way.

This lecture goes through the process of creating and publishing a WordPress page.

This lecture looks at creating and publishing a WordPress post.

In this video, we'll take some common web page we might want on a site and decide if those pages should be posts or pages, creating a site structure that works along the way.

How well do you understand posts and pages?

The homepage on your site is arguably the mot important page on the site. Why?

Let's have a look at the two types of homepage possible in WordPress.

This video shows how to set your homepage up as a blog.

This video shows how to create a static style homepage for your site.

A quick test on the homepage

Let's give visitors a way to contact us.

The About Us page is an important page on your site, so let's look at what we need to include on this page.

Let's complete the other legal pages using a plugin to speed up the process.

Custom Menus allow us to override Wordpress default menus so we have total control over the navigation system on our site.

Using Navigation Menu widgets (previously called Custom Menu Widgets), you can actually insert your custom menus into any area of your theme that is set up to accept widgets.

Adding a related posts section to your site can keep visitors on your site longer.

It can be a good idea to display the recently added posts in a menu, so visitors can see what you have added recently, and search engines can quickly find new pages.  This is easily done with a plugin.

Internal links in the body of your articles is a great way to keep visitor on site, and keep search engines happy.

Testing your understanding of website navigation

Please read this before you start this section of the course.

In this tutorial, I'll cover the basics of how you can keep your WordPress site safe from hackers.

This lecture shows you how you can reset the settings of the All In One Security plugin if you do get locked out of your dashboard.

In this video we'll install a security plugin and enable the basic features to help secure the website.

Stop Spammers is a free plugin that will dramatically cut down on spam comments.  

Keep automated backups of your Wordpress site using this free plugin.

There is one security hole that you might like to plug.  This video shows you an easy way of doing that.

Testing your WordPress Security knowledge.

Social sharing of your content can bring backlinks and traffic to your site. I don't have a recommended social sharing plugin, but in this video I'll show you how to look for them, evaluate the ones you find, and install the perfect social plugin (s).

If you need to showcase images on your site, this Responsive Lightbox plugin is useful.

Create shorter URLs with the option of tracking clicks.

This lecture shows you the three different site structures we are going to set up with WordPress.

No matter what type of site structure you are planning, the basic initial setup of the site is always the same.  This video goes through that set up.  Once you complete the process, you will be ready to start bui8lding your site.

This lecture has a zip file attached as a resource.  The zip file contains three demo content files you can import as you follow along with the course.  See the video for more details.

In this video we will create a simple blog using the homepage as the blog iteself.

In the previous lecture we created a simple blog using the homepage of the site as the blog itself.  In this video we'll switch to using a static page for the blog.

In this lecture we'll create a site using the business site structure we worked out earlier in the course.

This lecture looks at the best way to organize your site navigation.

In this video, we'll set up a hybrid site structure.

Let's look at a logical navigation system for this type of site.

Site Structure Questions

At the start of this course, I asked you about any problems you've had in the past when trying to learn how to use Wordpress.  This is a followup question, to gauge how much you've learned, and whether or not you have overcome those issues.

Important information on getting the most out of Udemy courses.

Useful resources.