Overhead view of a wooden desk with an open silver laptop showing a clean, freshly-installed website dashboard interface — a sidebar with simple menu items and an empty main content area. A small notebook and a fountain pen rest beside the laptop in soft natural daylight.

If you have a WordPress site, or someone has told you that you need one, and you are not sure where to start — this is the day that gets you started properly.

Who delivers this: Christopher Ross · WordPress trainer and freelance developer · WordPress training delivery since 2007 (broader training practice since 2004) · MA Candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University

WordPress 101 is the practical day for people who own a WordPress site, or are about to, and want to stop guessing every time they log in. By the end of it you will know what every screen does, you will have published a real page and a real post, and you will leave with a short list of the settings I want you to never touch and the ones I want you to check every month.

Upcoming session: in-person, full-day, St. Catharines on Thursday, October 22, 2026. Custom team dates available year-round.

Who this is for

  • Fit. Small business owners, non-profit staff, new marketing coordinators, anyone who has just been handed the keys to a WordPress site and told “you run it now.”
  • Fit. Owners who paid an agency to build the site three years ago, have not touched it since, and want to take the wheel without breaking anything.
  • Not fit. Developers who already write PHP, build custom blocks, or ship themes. That is 401 territory and you will be bored in the first hour.

Prerequisites: you can use a web browser and you have, or are about to have, a WordPress site you can sign into. That is the bar.

What you’ll be able to do after

  • Explain, in one sentence, what WordPress actually is and how it differs from Wix or Squarespace — so you can answer the question when your board asks.
  • Write and publish a Page and a Post, and know which one you are reaching for and why.
  • Use the block editor to build a layout with headings, images, lists, and buttons without fighting it.
  • Add an image to the media library, give it a sensible filename and alt text, and reuse it without uploading three copies.
  • Run the weekly maintenance routine — updates, a quick check, a backup confirmation — without panicking.

What your manager will see different on Monday

  • The weekly maintenance routine actually happens — updates run, the backup is verified, and the dashboard message stops piling up.
  • Image filenames stop being IMG_4471.jpg, and the media library stops growing by three copies of the same photo a month.
  • New pages get published as Pages, blog posts get published as Posts, and the difference stops being a guess.
  • Nobody on the team is afraid to log in any more, because they know which settings to touch and which ones to leave alone.

Curriculum, in four themed blocks

  1. What WordPress actually is. The difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, what your host does and does not handle, and why this matters the first time something breaks. Posts versus Pages — the single concept that separates “I get it” from “I keep guessing.”
  2. The block editor, on purpose. Adding, moving, and nesting blocks. Headings, paragraphs, images, lists, buttons, columns. Reusable patterns when you find yourself typing the same layout twice. The settings sidebar without the panic.
  3. Media, themes, and plugins without the mess. Uploading images that do not break the page, choosing a theme that suits the site you actually have, and installing a small handful of essential plugins (security, backups, SEO, forms) without ending up with twenty-eight of them.
  4. Settings, SEO basics, and keeping it alive. The Settings screens you should know, the ones you should leave alone, what a permalink is and why you do not change it casually, basic on-page SEO from the dashboard, and the monthly update-and-check routine that keeps the site healthy.

Real examples we’ll work through

  • A proper About page with a headline, two columns, an image, and a contact button — the page most small-business sites get wrong.
  • A first blog post with a feature image, headings, internal links, and a category that actually makes sense.
  • A simple homepage rebuild from the block editor, using patterns, that you could keep maintaining yourself.

Where this fits in the WordPress training pathway

Shaped for: New site admins, owner-operators, and anyone who has just been handed the keys to a WordPress site.

From here, the most common next steps:

The four WordPress courses are role-routed, not strictly sequential — each segments by the work you actually do on a WordPress site rather than by how long you have been around the dashboard. The full training catalogue shows how they sit alongside the Microsoft Office track.

Delivered as part of these service engagements

This course is included in the training scope of the following build and ongoing engagements — either at full public-cohort scope, or as a compressed version tuned to your specific build. The audit-and-build credit policy on the service pages covers the training surface too: training hours already delivered as part of a build credit forward against any larger engagement that follows.

Looking to book the public cohort or a private team session directly, separate from a build engagement? The pricing and booking surface below covers that path.

Format, duration, and pricing

Most teams take 101 as a single full-day class, six hours, either in person across the Niagara region and GTA or online over Microsoft Teams. The two half-days across a week format works well for retail or service teams who cannot block a full day; the half-day compressed format is a working introduction rather than a complete curriculum. Pricing is by format, with a per-day add for in-person delivery.

Training investment — up to 12 participants
FormatInvestment (CAD)
Half-day (3 hours, focused)$1,495
Full-day (6 hours, comprehensive)$2,495
Two half-days (split across one week)$2,795
In-person delivery within Niagara / GTA: add $500/day. Teams larger than 12, custom curriculum, or multi-cohort rollouts — let’s scope it.

Currently booking through Q3 2026. One public cohort per quarter in Niagara; private team engagements scheduled separately.

If a one-day fundamentals workshop is the right shape, here is the larger frame around it — the philosophy, the broader catalogue, and the speaking work it lives inside.

Upcoming

Next Available Dates

Public sessions for this course currently on the calendar. Click a date for full details and registration.

  1. WordPress 101 Training Workshop Beginner St. Catharines
Christopher Ross

Written by

Christopher Ross

I've been building WordPress sites since 2007 and on the open web since 1996. I've shipped editorial systems for the Postmedia national newspaper network and brand sites for Sherwin-Williams industrial brands, and I write about WordPress and editorial decisions from Fort Erie, Ontario.

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Common questions

How do you price this for a team?

Private on-site training: $2,250 per day for up to 3 participants, $175 per additional participant (maximum 10). Half-day: $1,400. Travel within 50 km of Fort Erie is included; beyond that, travel is billed at cost. Remote delivery: $1,800 per day. After a short discovery call I confirm the format, recommend the right starting level, and send a fixed quote.

Can you tailor this to our team's actual workbooks and templates?

Yes. If you can send me a sanitised example or two before the day — a real workbook, a recurring report, the spreadsheet someone always asks about — I build the exercises around it. People learn faster when the examples are theirs, and the workbook usually goes back to the team in better shape than it arrived.