All industries use WordPress making it a very in-demand skill set to learn. You can work as a WordPress Developer, Web Designer, or Web Developer with your knowledge of coding and WordPress for industries as varied as retail, education, news, advertising, and, of course, the tech industry. An important aspect of receiving professional WordPress training to set yourself up for a career change is learning what kinds of fields and industries that training will help you find work in. Each industry will have different requirements and expectations for prospective employees, and you should consider these expectations when you start your training. This is true for students who have an idea of what kind of work they want to do and for students who aren’t yet sure what path they want to take after learning WordPress skills.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is the web’s most popular content management system (CMS) used to create blogs, websites, ecommerce platforms, and much more. It is estimated that about 43% of the websites on the internet use WordPress, so you are likely to have visited a WordPress website whether you realize it or not. WordPress is open-source software, meaning that not only is the software free but anyone can use, study, rewrite, and distribute its code for whatever purpose they desire.
WordPress is a popular option for website creation because it is free to use and it is an easy and accessible way for those with no coding and programming experience to create professional websites and blogs. WordPress offers thousands of themes to choose from and plugins to download to customize the user experience for a website. Plugins on WordPress not only allow you to add different features to your WordPress website like ecommerce, email integration, discussion forums, and event calendars but there are data analytics plugins to help you run your business, manage the user experience, and optimize your website’s performance. With coding knowledge, you can customize and create themes and plugins to make a WordPress website even more unique and tailored to a person, business, or brand’s own needs.
What Can You Do with WordPress Skills?
Learning WordPress skills can have a variety of uses. Whether you are creating a website of your own or creating one for a client, it is useful to become familiar with WordPress software given its popularity as the leading CMS. WordPress itself offers themes and plugins that you can utilize with no programming or coding experience, making it incredibly user-friendly for beginners. With a basic knowledge of how to utilize WordPress, you can begin creating personal websites or websites for other businesses and even learn SEO strategies to ensure your website ranks higher in search results. Knowing how to create and publish content and do some basic customization of themes and plugins allows you to simplify the process of creating your own blog or personal website, generating an online portfolio for your creative works or business, starting an ecommerce store, opening a membership site, and so much more.
While your basic knowledge of WordPress can allow you to easily generate professional-looking websites, a knowledge of HTML and CSS will allow you to do more and customize more using WordPress. Once you know these basic programming languages, your WordPress skills will allow you to build websites from scratch. WordPress Developers, those whose career is WordPress website creation and maintenance, can create themes and develop plugins of their own for websites, optimize a website for the user’s experience, make sure everything is functional across mobile, tablet, and desktop devices, and work with Web Designers to make their prototype website designs into a reality. Learning how to use WordPress is a great option whether you are creating a website of your own or you are pursuing Web Development or Web Design as your career path.
Common Industries That Use WordPress
WordPress is widely used by every industry that has a website or general online presence. As the most popular CMS, WordPress is used to create websites, blogs, newsletters, and membership sites for industries from retail, healthcare, and education to the tech and non-profit sectors.
Ecommerce
One of the largest industries that uses WordPress is the digital sales and retail industry. Many sales of consumer and business goods occur online and WordPress is often used to create ecommerce websites. Within the retail industry, you will often find yourself working on the website for a single business, making sure that its site is functional and updated according to its needs as a company. You might need to be more up-to-date on digital marketing strategies and how paid advertising works when working for the retail industry.
Within this industry, those with WordPress skills will also need to be particularly adept at utilizing, customizing, or even creating retail-related plugins. WordPress is known for giving users access to paid and free SEO plugins, which will help to maintain a high search rank and direct traffic to the business’s website. Retail companies will often want you to utilize well-tested plugins like WooCommerce, the most popular open-source ecommerce plugin on WordPress, and even be able to customize it to their specific needs. Retail companies often want to stand out from the competition, so they will look for WordPress or Web Developers who can code and help facilitate the creation of their unique website designs.
Advertising & Public Relations
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, advertising and public relations is one of the top industries that employs Web Developers. There are many different ways in which WordPress is useful for those in advertising. WordPress offers the easy creation of professional-looking blogs and websites and advertisers also need to market themselves on their own websites, through the use of both personal portfolios and websites for marketing firms and advertising teams. Just like any other business, those with WordPress skills can help marketing firms and public relations agencies create a unique website to generate new customers.
Websites act as a form of advertising and WordPress has many plugins geared toward facilitating advertising on the platform. Those with WordPress skills will also often work with public relations agencies and advertisers to optimize a website not only for SEO best practices but also to keep up with current trends in the look, feel, and navigation of a website. Websites can be sent to potential clients and act as a way to reinforce brand identity or create publicity for a person, brand, or business, which requires you to think about a website itself as a form of advertisement. Advertising and public relations agencies might employ in-house Web Developers for these purposes or you might do freelance and contract work for small and large marketing firms.
Blogging & Media
Content creators of all sorts turn to WordPress to create personal and professional websites and blogs. As someone with WordPress skills, you can utilize them to create and broadcast content of your own or you can put your skills to use for another company or brand. WordPress is used by many major brands from music to the nonprofit sector. Taylor Swift, 007, and the Obama Foundation all have WordPress sites. If there is content you have that others need to see, WordPress is a way to manage it, post it, and create unique, customized experiences for users to engage with that content.
WordPress is also often used to create websites and blogs for news outlets. Many major newspapers, news organizations, and digital magazines run their websites through WordPress including Time Magazine, CNN Press Room, and Rolling Stone. WordPress started as a blogging platform and it is common for companies to still utilize it for this feature, many technology companies also have a news blog that they run on WordPress, like Meta Newsroom and Microsoft News. Companies, brands, and individuals utilize WordPress’s features to manage their content, interact with readers, and host their subscription services.
Web Design & Development
The largest industry that utilizes WordPress skills is the technology industry. Websites and applications are a dominant way in which people conduct business, communicate, and seek entertainment. If you have the skills to create and maintain a WordPress website, you will often find yourself working in a sector of the tech industry as a WordPress Developer, Web Designer, or Web Developer. Your knowledge of WordPress will be commonplace within this industry because many consider WordPress skills to be an essential part of web design and development.
Working within web development and design allows you the flexibility to work for a company that specializes in bringing in clients from other industries, to work for an individual company that needs a Web Developer or Web Designer, or to do freelance work and find clients of your own. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most updated report, the job outlook for those in this sector is expected to grow at a much faster rate than for other professions, making it a great career path to pursue. Your WordPress skills position you well to have the ability to create websites using WordPress software and to also know how to code should you need to create, update, or maintain other non-WordPress websites and applications.
Learn WordPress Skills with Noble Desktop
Noble Desktop offers a variety of affordable in-person and live online classes for those looking to learn how to use WordPress. A great bootcamp option is Noble Desktop’s 18-hour WordPress Bootcamp. Knowledge of HTML and CSS is a prerequisite to taking this bootcamp as it is designed for those who want not only an introduction to WordPress but who want to learn more advanced and specialized ways to code and develop customized WordPress websites and themes. This prerequisite can be fulfilled by taking Noble’s Web Development with HMTL & CSS class or equivalent knowledge and training in HTML and CSS. Students taking this bootcamp can expect to receive expert instruction and hands-on guidance as they learn the ins and outs of WordPress from installing WordPress, publishing posts, adding text, images, and video, and utilizing themes and plugins, to learning about more advanced customization options, downloading WordPress onto your own computer, and creating your own custom theme for WordPress.
Additionally, you can consider taking a longer, more comprehensive certificate program to learn multiple skill sets and tools throughout one class. The WordPress Bootcamp is included as part of two useful certificate programs offered by Noble Desktop, the Front-End Web Development Certificate and the Web Design Certificate. Both certificate programs are geared towards teaching WordPress website development and are for those looking to follow career pathways to become Web Developers, Web Designers, or WordPress Developers. Front-end web development focuses on coding the part of a website or application that users will see and interact with and this is usually the part of web development that you’ll need to know to become a WordPress Developer. The Front-End Web Development Certificate offers hands-on training from experts and taking this program will provide all of the skills necessary to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for front-end web development and WordPress website creation. The Web Design Certificate will be more useful if you are interested in not only learning to code, for WordPress and other websites, but also learning important principles of design and getting hands-on experience creating clickable prototypes of websites to add to your portfolio. WordPress Developers often do not need to design websites themselves but will need to know how to turn a design team’s prototypes into reality. Thus, it can be useful to know the design side of website creation.
Key Takeaways
- WordPress is one of the most popular ways to create a website
- Learning how to use WordPress will position you well for careers in any industry that needs to maintain an online presence or marketplace
- Those with WordPress skills often find themselves working for digital retail companies, advertising, and public relations agencies, news media organizations, or within the tech industry as WordPress Developers, Web Designers, or Web Developers
- You can receive comprehensive in-person or live online training in WordPress from Noble Desktop’s bootcamps and certificate programs