New to WordPress? Start Here

We love helping people discover WordPress and use it in creative ways. In fact, its one of the things that sets us apart in the LearnDash consulting space—we’re educators first, developers second. Every project we work on puts heavy emphasis on training clients to use their platforms effectively and delivering a great learning experience to users. We spend a lot of time teaching people to use WordPress and we’re always looking for better ways to deliver WordPress training.

That’s why we were very excited to partner with Mike Brown of TheBloggingBuddha to create an easier way to help beginners learn WordPress. What really sets TheBloggingBuddha apart is that it’s very simple, it’s comprehensive, and it’s free. An account is only needed to track progress and issue rewards.

TheBloggingBuddha walks new WordPress users through the entire website creation process, from buying a domain and hosting to setting up pages, posts and plugins in WordPress. By the end of the WordPress Orientation course, learners will have a fully-functional blog up and running; and best of all, they’ll understand how to use and maintain it.

Here’s a video that explains TheBloggingBuddha:

TheBloggingBuddha website is, of course, powered by LearnDash. That’s why we’re profiling it! The site itself is the result of a collaboration between Mike Brown (TheBloggingBuddha), Bourn Creative (site and theme development), and Uncanny Owl (all things LearnDash-related and authoring of the WordPress Orientation course).
What visitors to our blog will especially like is that it’s one of very few examples of a robust LearnDash site where all LearnDash courses are available to everyone at no cost. It’s often hard to showcase LearnDash on WordPress sites because the LearnDash content is only available to paid users. With TheBloggingBuddha everything is free—even without an account (users without an account just can’t see videos).

For our LearnDash readers, you can jump straight to lessons on how to start a blog to see how the course was set up in LearnDash. LearnDash was only lightly styled, and the Course Grid and BadgeOS plugins help to improve the look & feel as well as engagement. We did some development to handle things like a personal greeting, encouraging users to create an account, and redirections, but we really kept plugins and development to a minimum. It’s a great example of what can be done with LearnDash and some very minor customizations.

We hope you enjoy TheBloggingBuddha and find it useful, both for WordPress training and as a LearnDash showcase!