High Demand For WordPress Education Prompts Treehouse to Launch New Beginner’s Course

Treehouse offers technology education courses in a virtual environment to help users pick up new skills. Membership to the site offers access to various tracks of study that include topics such as iOS and Android development, web design, PHP, Rails development and more. Treehouse has been gradually adding to its collection of WordPress courses and this week the company announced a new beginner’s course in the WordPress track, titled How to Make a Website with WordPress.

This course is taught by Zac Gordon and covers everything from getting up and running to customizing a WordPress site with themes and plugins:

Installing WordPress

Managing and Customizing Themes

Using Custom Post Types

Managing Widgets and Menus

Tips for Using Plugins

Treehouse Plans to Prioritize WordPress Education

In February, Treehouse plans to add a new course on Local WordPress Development and is currently cranking out one or two WordPress courses a month.

I spoke with Treehouse instructor Zac Gordon to gauge the level of demand for WordPress education. Surprisingly, he said the company is actually receiving more requests for instruction on using WordPress, as opposed to developing for the platform. “While our main goal is to get someone to the point where they are ready to work as a WordPress developer, a lot of folks are more interested in being WordPress power users than they are at being developers.”

Smaller agencies and companies often use Treehouse in order to offload WordPress support for clients who are still learning how to use it. Gordon says that those requests are what inspired their WordPress for Website Owners course.

“At this point we don’t see as much of a request for in-depth material as we do for requests on specific topics or plugins,” he said. “For example, a lot of folks ask about working with child themes or custom post types so we cover that in a range of formats. We also get requests for things like WooCommerce and BuddyPress.”

Gordon is working on revamping Treehouse’s current theme and plugin development courses in order to keep the content fresh. A new theme development course aimed at beginners, followed by a more advanced course, will replace the current ones in the near future. He also hopes to launch a new course later this year for using WordPress as an application framework.

As the global usage of WordPress continues to climb past 20%, the reports from Treehouse confirm that the demand for WordPress education is at an all time high. High quality beginner’s courses are becoming just as important as advanced development tutorials. I expect this trend to continue as more people discover just how easy it is to manage their own websites with WordPress.