Last week, Lynda.com’s WordPress Essential Training course surpassed a significant milestone—100,000 viewers.
The WordPress Essential Training course, created by developer Morten Rand-Hendriksen, was originally launched back in 2010. It’s currently on its fourth edition, with a fifth on the way soon.
To celebrate the 100k milestone, Lynda is making the course completely free for a whole month, until June 18th. Be sure to check it out if you want six hours’ worth of WordPress video tutorials without spending a dime! (A full priced Lynda subscription typically starts at $19.99/month.)
All-in-One Beginner Course
Lynda has published more than 70 WordPress courses for various skill levels. The Essential Training course tutor, Rand-Hendriksen himself, has published a further 56 courses, too—including some non-WordPress ones.
So why has this WordPress course surpassed all others?
A lot of this is down to the approach taken by the course tutor. According to Rand-Hendriksen, he set out to “create the course I needed when I first started using WordPress.” This has resulted in a comprehensive course covering all of the WordPress basics in a lot of detail.
If you’re brand new to WordPress, the Essential Training course is a great starting point—hence its popularity. The course is divided into 12 ‘modules,’ all aimed at WordPress beginners. Let’s take a look at the course’s content in more detail, with a quick look inside each of the 12 modules.
- Getting to Know WordPress: Installation guide, WordPress.org, and WordPress.com comparison
- Getting Started with WordPress: Accessing WordPress, using the WordPress dashboard
- Creating Posts: The difference between posts and pages, using categories and tags, and adding images to posts
- Creating pages: Using page templates, organizing page hierarchies
- Managing Content: Using quick and bulk edit
- Changing the Appearance of Your Site: WordPress themes, using the Theme Customizer, using widgets
- Extending WordPress with Plugins: Installing plugins, creating contact page, social media buttons
- Profiles, Users, and Settings: User roles, editing user profiles, adding Gravatar profiles
- Getting Readers: Permalinks, managing comments
- WordPress Behind the Curtain: Managing plugins and themes
- Maintenance and Security: Important security plugins, troubleshooting site crash
- Diving Further into the World of WordPress: Exporting/importing content, creating themes and plugins
In other words, the course covers everything a beginner needs to know to build their first website with WordPress.
It’s a great course: well produced, easy-to-understand explanations, and the screen view makes it easy for you to follow along with the tutor every step of the way.
The Best Way to Learn WordPress?
The success of the WordPress Essential Training course has got me thinking: what is the best way to learn how to use WordPress?
Personally, I’ve always favored written content—websites or books. When it comes to WordPress, though, there are two main problems with written content:
- Time-consuming to produce—problematic as WordPress is updated frequently.
- Difficult to follow (in some cases)
For this reason, WordPress video courses—Lynda, Udemy, Sidekick.pro, WP101, etc—are favorable options. This is probably because students can easily replicate what they see on screen, plus the video producers can update their videos more quickly when the latest version of WordPress or a major plugin drops. Most video courses, including WordPress Essential Training, come with a written transcript anyway.
If you’re looking to learn the WordPress basics, and want a virtual tutor to guide you through the main processes, a video course could be just what you need. Why not join over 100k users and learn WordPress by following along with the WordPress Essential Training video course—remember, it’s free for the next 28 days!
What’s your favorite WordPress video course? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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