What It Really Takes to Create a WordPress Online Course

Bob: Hey, Bob here and I’m playing solo here today. It’s just me, but it’s not really just me. It’s me and a guest. I have my good friend, Bud Kraus. This is like… We’ve known each other for a long time. Bud needed to get on the show, Bud does a lot of stuff, Bud how are you doing?

Bud: I’m doing great Bob and yourself, how are you?

Bob: I’m doing good. I’m getting ready to fly to Oklahoma City next week for a meetup, a partnership meetup, but doing good. Bud has touched on Woo in lot of different ways. He’s tried it, he’s doing this stuff with Woo. We have a few things we want to discuss or get your insights on. Why don’t you tell a little bit about who you are, what you do.

Bud: Sure. So first, Bob, thanks again for letting me talk on your podcast because it’s such a valuable resource for everybody who uses WooCommerce or is thinking of using WooCommerce.

Bob: Thank you.

Bud: So what do I do? Well, I am a WordPress instructor and site developer in that order. And currently I am creating a new online WordPress training center where people will be able to take courses free and low cost on many WordPress subjects, like using Gutenberg, Elementor and so forth. Not sure about WooCommerce, how that might fit in. That’s not the first thing on the agenda. There’s so many things that have to be done first, but that’s not an impossibility down the road. It’s always hard to build these kinds of courses when the software is changing all the time. Very tough to stay current with that. And as far as site development goes, I’m really phasing out of projects because I really want to spend time just really focused on instruction which is really my thing.

Speaking of instruction, I have to say real quick, I first heard of WooCommerce I was teaching in New York City and this was must have been the very beginning of Woo. And a student came up to me and she said, “Hey, have you heard of WooCommerce?” And of course I said, “No.” So it made me feel kind of foolish. And this was probably in the days when all they were doing is themes and maybe they had the WooCommerce plugin. And she told me what it was. And I said, “Okay.” Little did I know what was about to happen over the ensuing years.

Bob: I think that’s what a lot of people say. I mean, it was like, you heard about it, you knew about it. Kind of, we’ll see what happens here…

Bud: And I didn’t have anything to sell. You see, you have to have a reason. And once you have a service, a product, something that you want to sell in my case, it’s courses. What are you going to learn this for? Just for fun now. I must say at even when I didn’t have something to sell, I actually taught WooCommerce in class. So all I did was learn Woo just for the purpose of teaching it. And that was my first introduction of really getting deep into the concepts of the cart and the checkout page and so forth, my account, all of the core component parts of WooCommerce. But even getting beyond that too, that was a lot of fun. And this was five, six, seven years ago, I still didn’t have anything to sell. I was always looking for something, what could I sell with this because I love it.

Bob: Yeah that’s it. I kind of grasped, I think, because over the years I always had it on there, but I was like, okay, well now I’m selling consulting hours. I’m selling web packages. I think one time I might’ve just been doing an ebook or two, which was pretty pathetic when you think of the power it has. And I would just do that, but it was on there so I went ahead and did it.

Reflections on State of the Word 2021

Now before we get into kind of the Woo stuff and talking more about what you’re doing. Let’s just go back in time. I should have some sound effect. I don’t know what it would be, but going back and not that far back in time. You were at the State of the Word with me in New York with several other people and just on reflection, what are we now, about two months since it happened? Yeah getting close to two months much. What stood out to you or any thoughts you had on it?

Bud: Well, I know it’s in the rear view mirror, but it was such a unique event and I think it will always be a unique event in the history of WordPress, because it’s not likely that there will ever be an event quite like it given the pandemic, given the fact that it wasn’t attached to the usual WordCamp US and that it was really a small audience, but streamed to thousands. And it was very intimate and there was a lot of energy because people hadn’t seen each other in a long time and they were just so excited. And I have to say that to me, the thing that kind of really touched me the most, now I had never met Matt Mullenweg. It wasn’t so much meeting him, that was fun and I had a nice talk with him, but the thing that he said to me that was really touching and memorable was when he called us WordPress royalty.

Now it might not mean anything to anybody but me, because I call people like Bob WordPress royalty. And I’ve done that, you know that right? And I’ve done that for a long time. I said, “Oh, this one’s WordPress royalty, that one’s WordPress royalty. I’m not WordPress royalty.” So I always use that term to designate or to indicate that somebody’s very active in the WordPress community, very well known, they’re contributors. And you know, I’m not in that category But when he called us WordPress royalty, that meant a lot because the truth of the matter is he’s right. We are WordPress royalty, all of us, the people that every day dedicate ourselves to pushing forward the WordPress project. So that meant a ton.

Bob: That’s interesting because, I mean, I remember him saying that, but that perception of it and yeah, it was a very small part, very quick part, few words, but it really did mean a lot because of the people that were there. The people, you know, made the effort to get there.

Bud: Well he knows he was talking to people in that room that WordPress meant a lot to them and not just in that room, but of course beyond, so it was great. I’m glad I went and I’m glad you went too.

Advice for putting together a WordPress online training course

Bob: Yeah. So training, just give us some, you know, I don’t care if you’re training WooCommerce, training WordPress, training about plugins, training Full Site Editor, whatever you’re training, it all intermingles, it all jumbles together in one way or another. How do you describe putting together an online WordPress training? What words of advice, insights you have, just give us some of that experience you’ve had?

Bud: I’m happy to do that, Bob. Thanks for that great question. Really that question was one of the big stories of my life last year. How do you do this? Because I had a lot of experience putting together free training videos on WordPress and people liked them. And I was used to teaching online and in class, but when you decide that you are going to sell courses, that is a whole different animal. I knew that going in and I had a foundation of information to start with. But if you don’t start with what, at least I knew, at least have an idea of some of the core component parts of how the site would be put together, you just can’t do it. And even if you knew what I knew to going in, you’re still going to have a hard time because there are so many options to choose from and not just options, but then how do these all fit together?

The integration, so I did a lot of research. I actually took time to really think this out, look at plugins, look at this, look at that, see how this works, see how that works. I started with the thought that I’m definitely going to use LearnDash because I was very familiar with it and I wasn’t using it correctly so now I would be able to use it correctly. But then what about the E-Commerce component? Was I really married to WooCommerce? Probably, but not a 100% sure. But I just didn’t like the whole product page, the shop page, the product page, the card page, you know, the whole checkout process. The funnel process if you will. I wasn’t really crazy about the way WooCommerce did it.

What could I do now? What I just expressed, I wasn’t even able to articulate that I didn’t like that. I mean, that took a while for me to figure that out. I don’t like that. Because people just tend to accept, okay, you know, looks good, works, blah, blah, blah. But it’s just not a real compelling experience. And then I met Cartflows and to me, Cartflows was the missing ingredient. What was the component piece? The layer, if you will, between the courses and WooCommerce? Is really Cartflows. I mean, in a way maybe I get that in the wrong order. It’s really Cartflows, WooCommerce and the courses, but it’s just a fantastic plugin that integrates very well with Woo Commerce and LearnDash. And of course you have to analyze this and figure out what plugins are going to need integration, plugins themselves and do these plugins play nicely with each other? And it turned out, those three were ideal, but boy, it took a lot of investigation to get to that point.

What was I going to do? And even so, once I started doing that, then it was okay, are you going to have subscriptions? What about payment? There’s so many other actors that you have to consider. And I’m not a 100% done with everything on that. But I pretty much bought into the WooCommerce subscriptions and in so doing that, I noticed this huge universe of WooCommerce plugins. Holy smokes, WooCommerce is certainly its own ecosystem, that’s to put it mildly. I mean, I don’t know how many paid plugins they have, but there’s a lot of them. So I bought into a couple of them. Subscriptions was one, there was one, I don’t remember what it was, but it was sort of a super coupon plugin that I paid for which it turns out I was overkill, so I didn’t need, and they refund my money.

I don’t know if they say in 30 days you don’t need this, let us know. So back, the money came and then there was another one about editing the checkout page. There was a plugin for that. So they have everything imaginable. I thought the support was really good that I was in touch with too, because I’ve had a problem with the PayPal integration and it turns out it’s not. And when I was looking at it, I thought, well there’s a bug in WooCommerce. Well, no, there’s a bug in my head so it wasn’t WooCommerce. It was the fact that the way PayPal it does its integration with subscriptions. But bottom line is I really was amazed at the growth of the add-ons that WooCommerce has now. It’s really amazing, just incredible. I mean, whether it’s in the shipping field, which of course I don’t need, but there’s so many things that you can do now to add on to WooCommerce. It’s extraordinary, really.

Take it slow and be meticulous

Bob: Yeah. It’s interesting because listening to what you said, and it’s very, I guess you’d call it meta, it’s your whole learning experience to create another learning experience for others. I mean, you had to get all this stuff in place and I can vouch that you took your time because I remember many times you came to me and would kind of bounce off a few ideas and you weren’t just jumping into it saying, I’m going to sell online courses, Bob. Oh, a month later, I’m online, I’m doing it. Everything’s falling apart but I’m moving right ahead. You’ve been meticulous.

Bud: No, you can’t do that. In fact, I’ve been very fortunate in this case because usually I put something together and then try to promote it. This time I build up the promotion first, before I launch. Yay good idea, Bud.

So, you know, now I have a list of people who are interested in knowing when the site’s going to launch and you know, all that kind of stuff that I’m keeping in touch with. And in fact, if you go to my site, JoyofWP.com, you can subscribe to find out when’s the site going to launch? What are the courses? How can I find out ,all that kind of stuff. So you can touch so JoyofWP.com for that. You know, I did, I took my time and I have been very fortunate in the context that I’ve had throughout the WordPress community. So many people have given me a lot of really great advice that I’m actually trying to listen to. But there’s sort of like two brains on this thing. There’s the sort of the structure of putting the site together. And then there’s all that content that has to be created. And those are two separate things and both take a lot of time.

And you’re creating the content and a moving target. So I was creating content based on WordPress 5.9, which launched a week ago. I was using WordPress 5.9 in the beginning of January, so that I’ll have extra life on that when it launches. And hopefully the changes that are coming to WordPress for the rest of this year will not be as dramatic visually and otherwise as what 5.9 is.

So I mean, it’s a very difficult time to do this because sort of right now, and for this year, we’re going to sort of have two WordPresses. We’re going to have the WordPress that uses the classic theme, that was now called the classic theme, the themes that people have been using since the beginning of time and the new block theme, which is the only way that you can take advantage of Full Site editing.

So that sort of gives us two different WordPresses and how do you teach to that? Well, I have to take that into consideration. So there’s so many different factors now when you put together courses, it’s insane. It really is. But I’m ready to do that.

Bob: Yeah it’s a pivot that’s yeah. A lot of things are turning quickly and you can’t… yeah. It’s like how many people are interested in this part and you it’s kind of the version one and version two of Bud. It’s like, I’m talking this way and then I’m talking this way.

Bud: And look at WooCommerce changes. So if you did a course on WooCommerce, the interface changes, now what are you going to do? You’re going to confuse people.

So it’s a challenge, but I love teaching and I get a kick out of seeing people use the knowledge to do something that solves a problem, or is empowering or creative or whatever it is. It’s really cool. So it’s what I do.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Wayflyer & Mode Effect

The challenges of WooCommerce online courses

Bob: You were talking about all the plugins, all extensions, the ecosystem, how huge WooCommerce is and I’m sure you might have a few other thoughts around it. But I was also thinking, did you ever look around and find, or discover, or wonder why there’s a lack of as far as WooCommerce specific online courses? I mean, is there anything that came out of that research? You obviously didn’t spend all your time doing that, but I’m sure that crossed your path.

Bud: You know, it has, and it’s been attempted, but I think there’s a bunch of reasons why it doesn’t work. One is that it changes. Okay but that’s not really the reason. I think people who develop sites using WooCommerce can learn this stuff on their own. They have a sufficient ability to do that compared to people who will be taking my courses like using Elementor or using Gutenberg, who are not the kinds of people who are developing sites for others, maybe they’re site developer wannabes. But they’re not as ready to learn on their own, like the WooCommerce person. In other words, the person that’s using WooCommerce for the first time already knows WordPress. I mean, otherwise they’ve dumped it. They’ve jumped into the wrong end of the hole, which is what I usually do. You know, like you got to like put the cart before the horse, so the horse before the cart.

So they’re already coming to WooCommerce with a WordPress vocabulary. All right. So that makes it a lot easier for them to learn WooCommerce on their own, because what’s WooCommerce? It’s a custom post type. At the end of the day, it’s that and a little bit more. That’s what WooCommerce is. So they can sort of figure it out themselves. And I think there’s the audience for learning WooCommerce online is much, much smaller than the general WordPress for beginners, WordPress 101, WordPress whatever you want to call it. That market is way bigger. That market is still developing. When I talk to people, I believe that’s still developing.

Bob: Yeah. And I’m what wondering also and this is what I used to think about when I would even just do little short tutorials, post type things, is that with WooCommerce and stores, there are so many little variables that how can anybody create a course. Let’s say you say, okay, I’m going to create a course on how to sell hair products, okay. Well, is this online? Is this also in person where people can walk in? What kind of hair products are you shipping to this?

I mean are you going to put in some video? I mean its kind of the same as WordPress, but there’s too many tiny variables that it would be hard to capture a large audience with. This is how you do this. Well, great I can do this, now I need to do these other 10 things, now how do I do that? You got me this far, and there’s too many little specific details depending on where they are, what they’re selling, how they’re selling. I get the feeling that, that a lot of that is hard to encapsulate in an online learning course, because it’s like, how can you hit on every possibility in even a single industry of somebody selling certain kinds of products?

Bud: Well, the answer is you can’t. And you can’t do it online. You can’t do it in class. I mean, when I taught in the city, WooCommerce, I created this fictitious site, it still exists called Woo guitars.com. And it was a store that sold electric guitars. It sold classic guitars, it sold bass guitars. And then we had packages and affiliate products and, you know, typical stuff just to demonstrate the different kinds of things that would come WooCommerce can do. Was it everything? No, but it was at least the things that you are most likely to need to know to build a WooCommerce site. And I think you could do that and not much more. In other words, somebody may want to use Authorize.Net for the payment gateway. Well, can you do 15 different payment gateways? No. But if you understand like one or two payment gate, let’s say you understand Stripe, and let’s say, you understand PayPal. Okay. And shipping and what zones mean and all that stuff.

If you build the fund fundamental skills, then you can’t really worry about whether they get the little fine point that they need for their site. It’s sort of like building a house, you could teach them the frame, the this, the that, but that little extra thing that they may have to figure out on their own. Web development is a very multidisciplinary and complex subject and it’s not possible to teach everybody everything. So I don’t, I’ve never thought of myself as that way. I think of myself as sticking to the bread and butter down the road, down the middle of the road, the fundamentals that you need to build any kind of site. I’ve been saying that since the days I taught HTML and CSS.

Bob: Yeah. I remember when I did some WooCommerce in person classes. Oh man this had to be, I don’t even know how long ago. Seven years ago maybe, maybe around that. I don’t know, maybe eight years ago. Anyway it was very basic. And I always remember this one person was there and we’d went through just, here are the options. Here’s what you can sell. Here’s what you can do. And he said, well what I’m going to do is he said, I’m going to sell one book online. Should I install WooCommerce on my site?

So I walked through and asked them, are you going to sell anything else? Consulting, whatever? No, no, no. Are you going to sell more than that one book? Nope, this is the only book I’m ever going to write. And it was like all around this one book. And finally I said I don’t think you need WooCommerce to sell a single book like you want to do. And so you’re right, you can only teach like the basics and then people got to run with it. And, and-

Bud: Well, it’s sort of like, you could call it edge cases, use cases, whatever you want, but you can’t teach everything to everybody. That’s just a fools’ errand, I mean, that’s crazy to even think like that. You’re not really doing anybody any good. You can’t do it. When you do teach in a class or even online, if it’s live, I do try to always tailor my approach to a finding out what people need so at least I cover that kind of stuff. It’s impossible to do all that because I don’t know everything. So somebody will say something that, to me, it sounds so esoteric or like their ideas are like, so half baked, I’ll say, why would you even want to do things?

Number one tip for building WordPress courses

Bob: What is your number one key piece of advice to, and you maybe have already said it somewhere within this conversation, but for somebody that says, I want to teach WordPress on my courses?

Bud: Okay. Fair enough. Well, don’t do that. That’s my first piece of advice. Stay out of my way, there’s plenty of other things you can teach. Get out of the way. I don’t need any more competition. I don’t need this. I don’t need that. So I would say dump that. Here’s what I would… and in all honesty, assuming that it’s not anything to do with WordPress, actually, there’s so many subjects. Look, you could do gravity forms. You could do whatever. There’s so many subjects. The first thing I would experiment first. I mean, if you really want to take it down to ground zero, and really start from scratch, then look at different learning management systems first. LearnDash is the big name in the business, but there’s a LearnWP, I think it’s called. There’s other plugins. You could actually build your own.

You could just custom post type plugin and make your own. I mean, there’s so many things you can do, but if you want what I would call a complete LMS out of the box, but you have to pay for it, is LearnDash. It just does it right with its hierarchy of courses and lessons and topics and quizzes. So it’s just really nice. Now the other thing is don’t start off selling classes. I think that’s my first piece of advice. You’ll screw it all up. You have enough to learn as it is. You’ve got to create content. You’ve got to market. You’ve got to grow an audience. Don’t start and so I had a site online for quite a while, couple years and so many courses. I just learned how do you make courses? What kinds of stuff do you run into?

What about login issues? What about server issues? What about everything? You know, get all that. And the other thing too, is you want use a good high quality, well known web host, because hosting is very important here. This is not a joke. So you want to have your system up all the time and performing well. And then of course the other thing is what video distribution service… See how many questions there are before you even talk about selling courses? What video distribution service do you want to use? Do you want to use YouTube? Do you want to use Vimeo? You’ve got all these considerations to get to before you even start with e-commerce. So I had to learn all that stuff first, things that I just take for granted now, like of course I use Vimeo, of course I used LearnDash.

I had to learn all the of course stuff first before I took that next step. Okay now I want to sell courses and making that decision was a long laborious process. It wasn’t just one day I woke up and go, I want to sell courses. It didn’t work that way. My best advice to people who want to get in the business of providing online training is, don’t start by selling courses. It’s not really a good way to do it because I feel very strongly that if you do try to do it and you’re really starting from sort of a beginner’s platform, you’re going to screw it up.

I probably will screw it up and I’m no beginner. No, I’m not going to screw it up. But I’m hardly a beginner and there is a lot to work through before you even put something online where you can sell.

So what’s really going to be cool about my site is I’m going to be using with WooCommerce, but you won’t even know it.

And it can work that way. Because WooCommerce is so strong on the e-commerce side of things. It’s what it is but you don’t have to show it. So people will go and they’ll go, I didn’t know this is WooCommerce. You really won’t know because of what Cartflows does, Cartflows sort of hides all the WooCommerce stuff. It makes it really cool. And really what Cartflows basically does is it makes the product page.

It really removes the cart page. So you really go from the product page, sort of a product page, right to the checkout and that’s yeah. So they take out the friction that you normally associate with the selling process, with the whole funnel, they take out as much friction as they can so that you can make the sale. I love that idea. Because the longer you get people to think the worst things get. Now you don’t want people to think. You want to make it easy and you don’t want to give them like 50 options of anything.I can’t wait to get my site launched. It’s going to be some time still because I’m in the production process. And that’s another thing too, for people who are new to the idea of online training and I’m speaking specifically to people who are doing screen casting, like using Camtasia.

That’s another thing. Well, how are you going to capture? Are going to use Camtasia? Are going to use something else or are you going to do standup videos? Or are you going to use Vi… You know, who knows? You know, but if you do use something like, well, no matter what you use, you’re going to have to produce the content and you’re going to have to come up with a production process. It just doesn’t happen overnight. Now I have a production process, but all these things take time. And it’s sort of like, if I can just real quickly digress to make the point, I have a potential client. It’s a very large community association and they got an old site, that’s not WordPress and they’ve got to start from scratch with a WordPress site. But one of the things they’re toying with is they want to sell tickets to the community events online.

Should they put that in the first iteration of their website? My answer is no. The reason is, there’s so much work to do just to relaunch the site in WordPress and take care of the brochureware kinds of things, whatever.The member login stuff, all that stuff has to be built first. And then we could talk about the e-commerce component. And they’ve pretty much bought into it that, that’s where this project should be cut, because if you don’t do it that way, you have so much more work to do. It will take twice as long to work through this. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t like doing new projects, because I don’t necessarily like going through these journeys. They’re journeys that I’ve gone through too many times and they can be rewarding, but they can be very difficult.

Bob: Yeah. Break it down into iterations basically.

Bud: Exactly. You explain to them that there are phases to the development of your site. It’s just like we’re building a shopping center. We’re not going to build the whole thing and then say, okay, come on in. We’re going to build the magnet stores and then a couple other stores and then say, okay, come on in and then we’ll build it out as time goes on. Same thing.

Bob: Right, yeah. That’s interesting because just swinging back to where you were talking about checkout and that whole process when we had Matt Mullenweg on the podcast just a little while ago, when one of the questions we ask him is what does he really want to see with the future of WooCommerce and that’s what his focus was. He said, focusing on making that checkout process seamless. And personally, that’s what he wants to see done and stuff. So it, it is an ongoing thing, we’ve had a lot of people talk about checkout.

Bud: I would like to see it quite frankly, either some kind of emerging of the cart page and the checkout page. I think there’s a big leap of faith there and there’s confusion. And I think maybe he’s talking about that too, but also that out of the box, that these elements in the product page, checkout page, cart page and so forth, that the elements are editable in terms of design and functionality. That you don’t have to get a million plugins to do this and do that, that natively. And maybe it’s done with blocks because WooCommerce is not block friendly, which is unbelievable to me or am I wrong about that?

Bob: Yeah. Well I think that’s another thing, well you were at State of the Word, he wants it all be Gutenberg. I think maybe it’s a slow process or making sure, but you know that it’s going to be there sooner or later.

Bud: I mean, that’s a very difficult jump to go from essentially the classic editor to Gutenberg. But there’s a lot of smart people who work on this stuff and one way or the other they’ll figure it out.Because yes I mean, I realize WooCommerce’s future is with Gutenberg. Yes kind of obvious. So that will give us the flexibility of designing these pages, these specific pages for WooCommerce and including changing the functionality of the features of these pages with blocks. So that’ll be really cool. And it has to be that way because it’s just all there is to it. I mean, when you go to use WooCommerce competitors, and I know WooCommerce does have competitors, they’re pre-advanced systems.

Bob: Well Bud, this has been a great conversation. Yeah, lots of boo and good stuff on online training Where can people connect with you on Twitter, your website, all that good stuff?

Bud: Well, I’m desperate for followers on Twitter. Well I’m pretty puny, I try, but you know, whatever. So that’s @JoyofWP. That’s pretty simple because Joy of WP is me. And of course the site is JoyofWP.com. And right now you actually see a video of what’s new at WordPress 5.9, but you also get the chance to subscribe to the new site. And see what’s coming up and stuff. But anyway, I’m around, I respond to email bud@joyofwp.com. Thank you Bob.