Late in 2011, I got involved with the fine video training company video2brain. They're based in Austria and offer a lot of software training, especially with Adobe products, but also WordPress, Joomla, and other goodies too. Their team of trainers work in many languages, and I've joined up to work on web software in English.

My first course, Introducing WordPress, is now available. It is, incredibly, an introduction to WordPress, is about four and a half hours long, and comes in two main forms: downloadable from video2brain, and on DVD with a booklet from Peachpit. The downloadable version is available today. The physical package will be available in mid-June, but you can pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or any other bookstore you like.

This course should give you a solid understanding of what WordPress is, how it works, and how to use it to build a basic blog or website of your own. It doesn't cover every single checkbox or use case (that would take literally forever), but it covers just about everything I think is critical to get you started. My hope is that you'll come out of the course feeling confident in piloting WordPress on your own. I don't assume much prior knowledge, just some computer literacy and a basic understanding of a what a website is. I also assume you actually want to make a website; the format of the training is "follow me as I show you how to do stuff", so I expect that you'll be following along, doing things as I show you how.

Five sample videos of the 50ish in the course are available on YouTube. You can judge whether I have that soothing voice for radio my friends and family never said I had. This one is about how to find and install plugins:

Here are the others: Useful Additional Software, Possible Gotcha: File Permissions, A Few Settings to Configure Right Away, and Choosing and Installing a Free Theme.

There are a lot of places to buy the course, but if you buy it from my little store I get a bigger cut of the sale. Better still, I have a coupon for you! From now until July 10, 2012, enter the coupon code WPRES20 at checkout from my store to get 20% off the course.

If you buy the course, or even if you just watch the sample videos, I'd love to hear about it. I have quite a few courses in the pipeline, on Drupal and WordPress, and maybe some other stuff too. No one wants to make stuff that stinks, so if you have feedback, send it along. In the coming weeks, I'll be posting more goodies: things I didn't get to cover in the course for time, ideas I want to expand on, and so on.

This is an exciting new step for me, working with a publisher and releasing a product. I hope you enjoy it!