Wordpress workshops
This week I hosted a two-day Wordpress workshop in Cornwall. I was showing the development-team from Imerys for the Eco-Bos project how to keep their website up to date with new content. Having given a training-course just about a month ago in Austria I was able to improve the whole package to be even more accessible to unexperienced users. Topics covered everything from writing articles and adding pictures and galleries to managing custom content types of the Eco-Bos homepage.
But not only did the participants learn new tricks with Wordpress, I learned some lessons about giving Wordpress-workshops as well. 
Statistics for motivation
Giving the future site-editors access to detailed user-statistics is a great way of getting them motivated to put some real work into the website. I only showed them the full Google-Analytics at the end when I should have done it right at the beginning.
Formatting text
It’s important to show novice users how to insert plain text and format it themselves. Most will just directly copy content from a Word-document. Importing unformatted text is one of the first things I teach. This is swiftly followed by instructions on how to set headlines, paragraphs, line breaks and lists. With these basic steps editors can already accomplish a lot.
Step-by-step written documentation
I came prepared with a 24-page Powerpoint-presentation going step by step through all kinds of tasks users will encounter. Yet still there is room for even more detailed instructions. And thought I try to make users truly understand the Wordpress interface many prefer clear instructions they can follow. However, they are absolutely capable of chaining and combining different instruction-sets, e.g. writing an article and then uploading and adding images. I’ll try to integrate this into my next presentation/documentation, where I will describe basic tasks in great detail while only hinting at their relation to one another.
Lots of content for training
Creating posts with dummy text can only be a start. Users make much faster progress when using real content. This is where all questions originate and users truly understand the connection between what they have just learned and how to apply it to their own website. Although I had asked my clients to prepare some content it was barely enough. Fortunately we came up with some new ideas along the way. Next time I’ll be a lot more specific and ask for the content beforehand to make sure it is sufficient for training.
Image manipulation
Training the use of Wordpress isn’t enough for website editors. Many of them are not prepared to resize images or otherwise prepare pictures for use on the Internet. In my next workshop I’ll check beforehand whether this is an issue and come prepared with a training part showing the use of Picasa or the client’s preferred application. I’ll also add it to the written documentation.
Repetition training
It is said that a human being needs seven repetitions to learn something by heart. During the recent workshops I figured that three times is about enough for every user to ease into the new workflows. After that they will be able to complete tasks with the help of the written documentation. This should be taken into consideration when tackling the “Content for training”-request. To make the training fun and exciting for everyone there’d ideally be three new content-items per trainee. Even better three new items of every class (gallery, post, page, custom).
Final thoughts
While the Wordpress back-end might seem overwhelming at first it becomes natural pretty quickly. While one day of trinaing is enough to get future content editors going two days give the opportunity of supervised training with real content. This is the best opportunity to answer all questions that will pop up quickly and saves the need for much support afterwards.
Kommentar hinzufügen
