About the Project “Build and Monetize Your Own WordPress Website”

This project, at first, was just the idea of a short video course.

The fact is that many people constantly had the same questions when creating sites based on the WordPress system. Of course, you can always find answers to these questions – there are a lot of high-quality and noteworthy reference books, guides, and thematic sites on the Web.

It turns out that very few people can do this. Those who can find answers already have enough knowledge to formulate questions and address them to search engines correctly.

People who do not have initial knowledge of web technologies cannot formulate questions correctly and, therefore, cannot quickly find the information they are interested in. They cannot evaluate the quality of the information found because they do not have sufficient basic training.

But that’s not all the troubles faced by novice website builders. Most importantly, there is no system in their actions. They do not have information about what each subsequent step should be. And what exactly needs to be done at each step, they also do not know.

But these are the people who usually most urgently need their own website! Writers and designers, owners of cafes and small shops, teachers, technical experts, home appliance repair specialists, and many others who know their jobs very well and want to use all the opportunities that owning their site provides for their benefit.

For such people to competently solve all the tasks associated with creating their own website, they must understand the stages and actions of this activity.

I have not been able to find enough, in my opinion, detailed and consistent guides that would allow non-specialists to achieve this understanding quickly. Therefore, the idea of a video course arose first, the content of which would answer questions not sufficiently disclosed by other authors.

After a comprehensive analysis, this idea had to be abandoned – such a presentation of information would suggest that the interested viewer has already studied many books and publications on creating sites. And it is enough for him, this viewer, to refer to my video course to complete his knowledge and then get to work without significant difficulties.

It quickly became clear to me that this approach would not work. Instead of filling in supposed gaps in knowledge, this knowledge should be presented as a step-by-step practical guide that does not contain gaps and unexplored topics! Therefore, instead of quickly making a short video course that was initially conceived, I had to think about more serious work.

Here’s what I managed to come up with.

First, we need textbooks. You can call them reference books or manuals – this does not change their purpose. I will call them books.

These books should be as detailed and consistent as possible. They should cover not only all issues related to the site’s creation but also all issues that must be resolved before the site’s creation and after it is fully completed and begins to function.

Secondly, you need workbooks. They should be related to the structure of the books, correspond to their content, and allow recording of the results. After creating several drafts, I decided that each workbook should correspond to one book. Remember how it was at school? I got about the same thing but in a more practical form suitable for real work.

Planner – This is the form of the workbook suitable for better understanding all work processes, documenting the actions performed, and planning the work yet to come.

Thirdly, books and planners should cover the site’s entire life cycle and adequately distribute it across volumes. Each book volume and its corresponding planner should focus on a specific stage in the site’s life cycle.

Studying the material of one book and filling the corresponding planner with real results should mean solving all the problems at certain stages of the creation and operation of the site.

It quickly became apparent that creating several volumes of the manual, each with its own planner, requires a reasonably large amount of work. And it will take time, a lot of time!

And I started to work. I will write in the next post what came out of it at the moment.

Please visit the project website for more information.