Steve Boneham, who works as a Consultant Trainer at the staff development organisation Netskills, is currently developing a workshop which helps people with little technical knowledge to start hosting their own WordPress sites.

The pre-workshop buzz looks encouraging.

“I’ve had a lot of positive feedback in the developing stage”, Steve said.

“Certainly, the time is right for WordPress. A lot of people are interested and there’s a lot you can do with it.”

According to Steve, getting rid of the fear of the code is one of the main aims of the workshop.

“The level of customisation we’re talking about means we’re not going in to write a lot of PHP or create our own plug-ins, we’re just tweaking the stuff that’s already there”, he said.

“I’d like to teach people to understand the code and not be afraid of it. It’s quite intuitive once you get into it but I think there’s that initial fear factor of ‘this is code, it’s PHP, MySql and other stuff that I don’t really understand’.”

The workshop covers all the underlying anatomy of WordPress – posts, pages, categories, tags, databases, php, templates as well as how to install it, secure it, configure it and start using it.

“The idea is that by the end of the day, the attendees can take away something that they’ve actually constructed – a working site”, Steve said

The workshop is being piloted next week and the first public one is set to run in June in Newcastle.

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