woman chewing pencil and smiling at computer screen

WordPress for Beginners – online course

Starting on 24 September 2020 I taught a 10-week course for Hills Road Sixth Form College and will be offering this online for the foreseeable future. Visit the Hills Road Adult Education pages and search for ‘WordPress’ to find course details. The courses will run either on a Wednesday morning or a Thursday evening and …

Read more

You need to take orders online… and you’re not ready

Small local shops are facing challenges like never before during the Covid-19 pandemic. So are the big ones, but they have marketing departments and other infrastructure to help them cope. As a small shop or local business you’re facing a situation where your usual and loyal customers are self-isolating and you’re not getting any passing …

Read more

Useful links for planning

When planning your site here are some useful links for you to check out. Comparing the hosted options Make a Website Hub reviews the choices between the hosted options below. Visit their sites to check out the current offers and pricing plans: Wix Weebly Squarespace WordPress.com WordPress: .com and .org WordPress.com and WordPress.org are easily …

Read more

Technical options

Basic overview For a website you need four main things: the content for your site – images, text, etc hosting: a place (on a server) to keep it where it can be kept safe web address: the url starting with www. that is the place where people can find your site when they browse the …

Read more

Site structure and content planning

Who will be managing your site? At the planning stage it’s crucial to consider who will be managing your site. Think about what staff/time resources you’ll have to keeping it updated in the longer term. Ask yourself: Who will update the content? Are they volunteers or paid staff? Is their position secure or is the …

Read more

Website planning

Do you even need a site? Maybe your client group’s online communication takes place almost exclusively via a couple of specific apps or social media sites such as twitter or facebook. You should certainly ‘be where they are’ but you should consider a website as well. Even if you don’t communicate with your clients using …

Read more

child stacking colourful square blocks with pictures on them

Gutenberg Resources

In December 2018 Gutenberg – the new WordPress – editor finally launched and changed how we edit WordPress sites. It is intended to make the editing process easier, more intuitive and more fun for general users. I’m a fan – I think it’s a step in the right direction and makes editing easier and clearer. …

Read more

map with pins in

Free Google Map

Google has now started charging, or at the least taking credit card details, in order to let you use their API key to add their maps to your site. You can read more about that here in this useful blog post from High Rise Digital. It’s still possible to add a google map for free, …

Read more

Separating two blocks

Sometimes you want a gap between two blocks. When you have an image that has text from a particular paragraph block wrapped around it you may not want the following paragraph text block to wrap as well. Separating blocks can be a problem with an image block and a paragraph block that you have put …

Read more

woman in dark street, blowing glitter off her hand as if to make a wish

Gutenberg Blocks Wish List

WordPress users like Gutenberg Gutenberg, the new ‘block’ editor, is a great development for WordPress.org. Editing content is more intuitive, especially for beginners. I have demo’ed Gutenberg for my local WordPress meetup (in Cambridge, UK). I’ve also taught Gutenberg as part of a 10 week beginners’ course on WordPress at a local college. In both …

Read more