For the past several years I have worked with clients in building WordPress powered sites. Their individual knowledge varies greatly. Some understand the basics and don’t really wish to know more, some are extremely “savvy”, others are starting from scratch and need a jump start lesson in the basics of managing their site. (posting, creating pages etc).
With each client I find myself offering a variety of ways in which they can learn what they need to learn. In some cases I point them to the codex, in other cases I point them to one of the many various tutorials available across the web. In the end however I still found myself spending a lot of time via email and via the phone, explaining to them the basics.
I believe that a clients understanding of the basics of how their site operates is an important factor in their ability to keep their site “working for them”. So I encourage my clients to learn the basics and use the codex as reference whenever possible and as they have time. However I started to realize that often times my links to information within the codex or other tutorials would get overlooked and they would come back to me with a question.
Bottom line is that they were looking for a quick answer and for whatever the reason may be, diving into something called the codex was a little to daunting.
After time I started to package and ship out a very basic user reference pdf to each one of my clients on completion of the project. Nothing technical because in most cases they would come back to me for that anyway.
This approach saved me phone and email time in going over the basics of their site, plus they would always have it as a reference.
So my plan is to work on updating my current version and since I am doing so I figured that I may as well make available for download.
I realize there are other guides available out there but hey someone might find the one I put together useful so why not.
In my next post I will layout my current sub-sections as well as thoughts on additional subsections. From there I may go on to publish the actual subsections as I add them to the pdf, again feel free to add your comments there.
Note: I plan to link to the codex wherever applicable because I still think that it is the most important reference for the basics.
If you have any ideas for additional information please feel free to share but remember this is very basic use no code, no “speacial tricks”.