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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:01)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode is all about teaching others to use WordPress. It includes a segment from my interview with Allie Nimmons, a LinkedIn learning instructor and WordPress coach. Allie provided some great tips for teaching clients how to use their website.
Now, you can catch the entire episode over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:32)
Teaching is is one of those things that it comes with the territory, right? It's something that we do for our clients to help them learn how to you know manage certain portions of their website. ⁓ And it's a challenge because a lot of us ⁓ are very technically minded. We speak in jargon. We don't always think about the person who is just being introduced to WordPress. ⁓ What advice do you have for for those
Those of us in the industry who are training others, what should we keep in mind when we're ⁓ thinking about training?
Allie Nimmons (01:09)
I would say start keeping a list of all of the things that your clients ask you. that to you, you're like, well obviously XYZ is the answer, right? Like if a client asks you, well, how come I how come I have to put if I want to blog, how come I have to publish those in the post section? Why can't I just post it as a page? We know the answer to that. But to someone just walking in, that's not necessarily intuitive, maybe. ⁓
So keep a blog of all of those things, of all those questions that people ask you, because you'll start to identify patterns of
I want to say this really kindly, where WordPress is not as intuitive as it could be, I think there are a lot of things about WordPress that are not as beginner-friendly as they could be. And so identifying those things. So for example, one of the things I really like to do when I hand a site over is adjust the dashboard so that the client can log in. And if if all they're doing with that site is blogging, really the only option they have is to go into posts.
Eric Karkovack (01:56)
Yeah, yeah.
Allie Nimmons (02:19)
Right. And if they need to go into the administrator account to do other things, they can do that, but they can have an account just to go ahead and post things and they don't have that whole menu and all those other things to be there to overwhelm them. ⁓ because in my experience, even if I'm super gung ho about training, I get a lot of clients who are like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't want to touch it, I don't want to break it, I'm not a technical person, I'm scared, and you have to
Eliminate that fear for them so that they will be open to being trained. Like you could be the best teacher in the world, but if the client does not believe that they can do it, they're not gonna wanna sit in a training session with you. They're not gonna wanna read through any documentation you give them. ⁓ so yeah, I think my my advice would be really pay attention to the questions that people are asking. ⁓ go on WordPress.tv and and look through some of the talks that people have given that are very
beginner level basic things. because yeah, once when you've been using WordPress for 15 years or however long it's been around, ⁓ yeah, you take for granted the things that are now second nature to you. So you kind of have to unlearn a little bit and put yourself in a begin beginner's perspective. and start with those foundational things. So starting with outs those foundational things and then making it more approachable of an experience.
for the client actually participate in. 'cause I do it is really scary sometimes to log into a site and there's eighty five million things that you can click on and you don't know which one you're supposed to click on and you feel like if I click on the wrong thing the whole site will break. You're not gonna wanna interact with it then. Yeah.
Eric Karkovack (04:00)
Exactly.
Yeah, I I I I found that, you know, just doing one on ones with clients, they tend to, you know, they kinda get that aha moment after a little bit. ⁓ it just takes a little bit of time and patience, I think, to to get them to to see that you're not really gonna break anything. You know, you're gonna be okay, you know and and you know, if you have questions, I think that's also a an important thing, right? Just make sure that they know somebody's there to help them when they need it.
Allie Nimmons (04:09)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, exactly.
Eric Karkovack (04:30)
So w have you noticed any certain patterns with users over the years? Like there's some things that ⁓ nobody gets right away, or or that that they you know, that just the common struggles that that you notice when working with with beginners or, you know, and and I think we'll we'll get to it in a little bit more experienced users even.
Allie Nimmons (04:53)
That's good question. I think the thing that I've noticed a lot recently is if a client is trying to update something on the site. So if they're trying to add a new page or add new content, there's a real challenge in keeping things consistent. So, you know, if I've designed a site and I know that all of these certain types of headings are styled in this one way, they might go in and use a different type of heading that I wouldn't use for that section.
Or they would use a different block. Like, you know, in the in the block builder we ha or so I use Kadence a lot for a lot of my my sites and they have a a text block and there's also the native paragraph block. So they might not be sure which one they're supposed to use and they might use the wrong one. So I think having them understand a sense of not even understand, but having it be easy for them to accomplish a sense of consistency can be a challenge.
Eric Karkovack (05:37)
Yes.
Allie Nimmons (05:53)
And s so then when they look at the front end of the site, it doesn't look the way that they want or it doesn't look the way that they expect and they don't know why. ⁓ and I think that that goes into also just design practices of you know, maybe setting up templates or things like that to make sure things are easier. But it's I think one of the challenges, particularly with page builders, even though I love page builders, is they kind of seem approachable.
at first glance, but if you're like, well, I can't figure out how to center this or I can't figure out how to get this link to open in a new tab and you're you're going through all of these different options, I think people tend to get lost in all the options, in all of the settings and all of the tabs and things like that. ⁓ which again is
It's like WordPress's fault, but it's not WordPress's fault. There's just so much that this tool can do that at a certain point I think it gets scary for people to look at. 'cause they're overwhelmed with that with that choice. so yeah, I think the thing that I noticed the most that people struggle with is getting things updated in a way that requires like design. So like for somebody to just go ahead and write a blog post and publish it.
that tends to be pretty easy. But if somebody wants to add a new section to a page, even if it's to us it's like, it's just an image and a a few lines of text, to them that is insurmountable and doesn't come out the way that they liked or the way that they wanted and they get frustrated. So yeah, I think being able to maintain that sense of visual consistency, which keeps the the site looking good is a challenge for a lot of people.