Wordpress website course?

[David Hust]

A number of schools teach web design using frameworks like React or Sveltekit. Does your school have a course for making Wordpress websites or CMS websites in general? The idea of being able to handoff a website to a customer and they can update it, seems more reasonable for high school students and businesses.

Students would learn how to make a basic Wordpress site:

• host it locally
  
• publish it to a hosting site
• use themes like Elemental or Divi
• add plugins (but not too many)
• make websites for local businesses
  
• learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS

[Sharon T]

Hi - Our school does not have a class like this, but I wanted to pass on a kindle book that is free TODAY only with great WordPress tutorials. Your students can get it for free today also and self-study it if they are interested.

The author (Dr. Andy Williams) is an instructor for WordPress on Udemy and the courses are fairly inexpensive.

WordPress for Beginners 2026: A Visual Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering WordPress (Webmaster Series)

Sharon Tomski

St. Thomas More High School

Milwaukee, WI

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[Pete Reynolds]

You may find additional support/ideas from the Milwaukee WordPress meetup:

 https://www.meetup.com/milwaukee-wordpress-meetup/events/312774109/?eventOrigin=group_upcoming_events

-- Pete

Pete Reynolds
Co-Founder
Learn Deep MKE
414 630-5980

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[Hust, David]

Thanks for the resources. I'm good with the content, I was looking more to see if anyone has taught it, did they think it was worth making the class, any ways you have connected with customers, what things worked best for students, any issues with IT and hosting.

Thanks.

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[Cole Tyler Nelson]

We do something similar for our non-majors' Intro to Web Dev class!

We host a WordPress site for every student and spend the first 1 to 2 weeks of class learning about building websites through WordPress. We then move into HTML, CSS, and JS, and eventually circle back to WordPress integrating some little widgets (calculator, form, etc.) into their WordPress site 🙂 

A couple of things to be aware of...

• We host the WordPress site for students and direct them to wordpress.com or similar if they want to host their own site.
• We talk about self-hosting, but mostly point to paid hosts — a previous instructor had lots of issues with trying to have students run a WordPress website on their own machine.
• Hosting websites for students adds complexity for us, but we have great help from our CS Lab! Every student's website runs as a docker container.
• Their homework assignment that week is to build a personal portfolio (about me, my work, etc.). We require a certain number of pages, blocks, plugins, and use of a custom theme — beyond that, it's their choice on how to build it.
• WordPress is just a gentle introduction to web dev before getting into HTML, CSS, and JS. 
• Students host their HTML/CSS/JS work on GitHub pages.
• Most of our time is spent on JS as this is an intro to programming course for the web. I think students could get a lot of value out of design principles and focusing on business relations as well!

Sincerely,

Cole Nelson
Teaching Faculty | Computer Sciences | UW-Madison

coletnelson.us

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From: wi-csandi...@googlegroups.com <wi-csandi...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Hust, David <david...@franklin.k12.wi.us>
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2026 8:59 AM
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Subject: Re: [WI-csandit-teachers] Wordpress website course?

 

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[Hust, David]

Thank you Pete and Cole for all of your information!

I currently have a web/app dev class using Sveltekit, but my thought behind Wordpress was that they are much easier to create and can be a nice side hustle, kind of like people in the trades doing side jobs.
Now I'm thinking of doing Wordpress for part of 1st semester and then Sveltekit for the rest of the time. Just don't know if I can squeeze in both while allowing students time to be creative with both.

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