This was a beginner-tier WordPress talk I delivered in November 2014, walking a room of brand-new WordPress users through the foundation: the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, what a theme actually does, what a plugin actually does, and the first few decisions that shape every WordPress site that follows.
The era this talk lived in
Late 2014 sat in the WordPress 4.0 to 4.1 cycle. The Representational State Transfer (REST) API was still a plugin. The Customizer was maturing. The block editor was three years away from launch and not yet visible on the public roadmap. Beginner-tier WordPress training looked very different than it does in 2026: most of it was screenshot-walkthrough material, because the editor surface was Classic and the screens were stable enough to make screenshots useful for more than a few months.
What aged well
The teaching pattern. Beginner-tier WordPress instruction works when it establishes why before how: why you need a login, why posts and pages are different, why a theme and a plugin do different jobs even though the line between them sometimes blurs. The 2014 talk’s structure of foundation first, technique second, is the same pattern I still use in beginner-tier WordPress training work in 2026.
What has changed since
The screens. Every part of the WordPress user interface has moved since 2014: the editor, the admin area, the Customizer, the block library, the patterns directory. The deck’s specific screenshots show their age the way 2014 web design generally does. The underlying teaching pattern is the current beginner-tier course pattern in evolved form.
Slide deck from a beginner WordPress talk, November 2014, archived for reference.
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