Newsletter AI Learning, Keeping It Human
Christopher Ross

WordPress training 101

Christopher Ross

7 min read

AI and learning, kept human · Niagara, Ontario

Overhead view of a wooden desk with an open silver laptop showing a clean, freshly installed WordPress dashboard: a sidebar of menu items and an empty content area, with a notebook and fountain pen beside it in soft daylight.

What it costs $750–$1,495 CAD

Someone handed you a WordPress login and walked away, and now every click feels like it might break something. This is the day you stop flinching.

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. People who already publish weekly and just want their posts to rank. If you can publish a page without help and you have an SEO plugin installed, you are past this day. Book 201 instead.

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 count 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.

The day, block by block

  1. Tell anyone who asks what WordPress actually is, and stop guessing between a Post and a Page. The difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, what your host handles and what it does not, and why that matters the first time something breaks. Posts versus Pages is the one concept that separates “I get it” from “I keep guessing.”
  2. Build a real layout in the block editor without it fighting you. Adding, moving, and nesting blocks. Headings, paragraphs, images, lists, buttons, columns. Saving a pattern when you catch yourself typing the same layout twice. The settings sidebar, with the panic taken out of it.
  3. Add media, pick a theme, and install plugins without making a mess. Uploading images that do not break the page, choosing a theme that suits the site you actually have, and installing the small handful of plugins that earn their place (security, backups, SEO, forms) instead of ending up with twenty-eight of them.
  4. Keep the site healthy with a routine you can repeat every month. The Settings screens worth knowing and the ones to 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 that keeps the whole thing alive.

Real examples we’ll work through

  • A proper About page with a headline, two columns, an image, and a contact button. This is 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 one 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.

Format and duration

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 multi-day program.

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

Working through something on your own site? Get in touch →