I mentioned this course in an earlier blog, but finally got it finished this week! I really like the idea of Udemy, which provides online access to hundreds of really good training courses covering a wide range of subjects. They’re pretty good value for money too – I think this WordPress course cost £15.
And I’d definitely recommend this course to anyone playing around with WordPress, who might also be interested in developing a career as a WordPress Developer. It’s very well paced and, even toward the end, well explained so you never really feel out of your depth with anything. It goes through setting up a local server to complete a number of the earlier projects, and then setting up a hosting service to complete some of the later ones, including creating an account on Gregg’s multisite platform for using some of the premium themes and plugins which really begin to show what WordPress can do, and actually how easy it is to do it. Whilst I was doing the course, I was also playing with my WordPress multisite installation to recreate a number of websites for local businesses who could be potential customers if I ever decided this is a path I’d like to travel down. You never know when the contract market might take a turn for the worst, so having this in the back pocket might not be a bad thing.
Gregg’s style is very good too, generally encouraging you to try and complete many of the steps, before walking things through the way he’d do them. I suspect my next step will be to try and develop some more advanced HTML and CSS skills, which would come in handy when it comes to tweaking and fine tuning some of the more complex things you might want to do. That said, I’ve still got lots to learn about using WordPress, and with the right themes and plugins, most things can be achieved without any additional code. A number of the lessons use the Genesis framework and themes, which I really liked using, but which would also be a $500 investment to get into. Maybe if I get around to developing a few websites, I might go back to them, but for the time being, and after quite a lot of research, I invested $80 in the Elegant Themes Divi theme and plugins. This provides much more functionality that the basic free themes available, and most things can be done through a graphical builder so you can actually see what things look like as you build them. I’ll probably do a separate blog on Divi over the coming weeks.
Anyway, just thought I’d provide an update having mentioned this previously. Even if you have no interest in WordPress, check out Udemy and see if there’s something that interests you. It’s a cheap way to learn something new or develop some basic skills you already have. I’ve already bought my next one, so expect a blog about Excel VBA at some point in the future 😉
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