Easy WP Guide: Great for Customers, Clients

Published

April 9, 2013

10 Comments

Many of us are looking to provide continuing education for our WordPress clients, customers, and even friends and family at times.

But let’s be honest, if you’re a designer and/or developer then you might not feel like educating your clients and customers is the best use of your time or that you’re very good with doing that at all!

So you’ll either hire someone to provide that continuing education or bite the bullet and spend a few hours teaching them stuff that might actually make you pull your hair out.

Or wait, there might actually be another solution out there for you…

Easy WP Guide is a simple (yet effective) and free WordPress manual that you can give to your clients and customers so that they can learn what it takes to run a WordPress site.

As they advertise, the reader won’t find HTML, PHP code, or talk about making that killer theme or plugin – rather, they’ll be treated with easy-to-understand language and images to boot. Take for example these few screenshots with annotations:

But the best thing (besides being free) is the fact that the author has put a Creative Commons license on it and even allows contributions from others to make it even better.

It’s available in the following formats:

iBookstore
Amazon
Nook
PDF
Word Document

So it’s an open source project as well!

Thanks Anthony Hortin for making this available to the public and for saving us all countless hours! You rock!

There are 10 comments

April 9, 2013 #

Mike

Hi John

Is there supposed to be a link?

Mike
- April 9, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  oh wow…! fixed!
April 9, 2013 #

Japh

Anthony’s Easy WP Guide is fantastic. Used it a number of times myself, and it can make a huge difference for clients. Nice work 🙂
- April 9, 2013 #
  
  Anthony Hortin
  
  Thanks Japh! It’s great to hear when people are making use of it. I appreciate the support 🙂
April 9, 2013 #

Anthony Hortin

Thanks for featuring my Easy WP Guide, John. Much appreciated. My aim was to keep it nice and easy for people to read, but if anyone finds one particular area lacking or not explained well enough, I’m always open to suggestions for improvement. I’ll keep updating it as each new version of WordPress is released.

Cheers!
- April 10, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  dude, it’s awesome!
- April 10, 2013 #
  
  grappler
  
  Hi Anthony!
  
  How do you see your project in comparison to the codex?
  
  Is there any way someone else can help?
  
  Where would you like feedback on specific pages?
  
  Thanks, I find it a cool idea.
  - April 10, 2013 #
    
    Anthony Hortin
    
    The Codex is awesome! I’m using it constantly, but that’s from a developers viewpoint. I think the problem with the Codex at the moment though, is that it’s a bit daunting for new WordPress users or people who just want to know how to keep their content updated. For example, there’s a link called New To WordPress – Where to Start. When you go to that page there’s information on hosting requirements, setting up & configuring WordPress, working with theme templates and a whole bunch of other stuff. All really interesting stuff, but when you want to try to educate your clients on how they edit their pages or add a menu item, it’s all a bit much.
    
    My main aim, when I started out writing all this doco, was to keep it simple. I wanted a manual that I could give to clients that would help them with things like adding pages, adding posts, updating menus, replying to blog comments and all those other tasks that people like us most likely do everyday. It’s also why there’s sections that I’ve intentionally left very light. For example, I briefly discuss all the Settings pages but I don’t go into as much detail as I do with the other menu options. The reason being is that once a client’s website is setup, they really shouldn’t need to worry about touching anything within those pages.
    
    I know that Siobhan McKeown has recently just started working for Audrey Capital and more specifically, has been brought on to clean up the WordPress documentation, so it’ll be interesting to keep an eye on it and hopefully it’ll only start to get better.
    
    As far as helping, probably the most helpful thing is simply spreading the word. When I update the guide for each version, I’ll update my Mac Pages document first up as I then use this to create the PDF, Word Doc, and ePub versions of the guide. After that’s complete, I’ll then add the content to the site. Because I’m working in a Pages doc, it kinda hard to have multiple people working on it.
    
    As far a feedback goes, there’s nothing specific that I need, but if you find something that I haven’t explained it properly, or (eek!) I’ve got something wrong, I’m always open to suggestions to improve on it.
    
    I hope you find it useful 🙂
April 10, 2013 #

flippertie

I downloaded the Word version to take a look at the guide and I’m getting a warning:

“”Office File validation detected a problem while trying to open this file. Opening it may be dangerous”. googling suggests there is either a malformed schema, or malicious code inside.

Is anyone else seeing this?
- April 10, 2013 #
  
  Anthony Hortin
  
  Microsoft, in all their wonderful wisdom, implemented a security patch a little while ago. It’s called Office File Validation and unfortunately, it looks like it’s showing this warning message to any documents created using Microsoft Office 97-2003 versions. The document that you downloaded was saved using Word 2003.
  
  I’ve converted the guide to Office 2007 format this morning and I’ve just changed the link a few minutes ago, so if you download the new file, you should be able to open the file without seeing that warning.

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?