WordPress is one of the most popular pieces of software in the world, powering many of the most popular blogs and websites. It is very approachable, pretty easy to use, and has a vibrant ecosystem of plugins and themes allowing people to make all kinds of websites. If you have never used WordPress and would like to learn more about it, or if you've played with a WordPress.com site want to expand your powers by hosting your own WordPress site, check out this new video training course from ShooFlyDesign, video2brain, and Peachpit.

Introducing WordPress: Learn By Video is four and a half hours long, and is available as streaming online video and DVD with booklet from Peachpit. The DVD version (ISBN 9780321858467) is available 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. 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.

If you buy the course, or even if you just watch the sample videos, I'd love to hear about it, so if you have feedback, send it along.