What Do WordPress Users Really Want From Their WordPress Website?
What does someone who invests money into getting a WordPress website built for their business actually want or expect to get from their website? In this article, we look past all the marketing hype and cut right to the issue of delivering on promises and expectations.
Businesses that choose to invest money into getting a website built are generally comprised of non-technical-minded end-users.
Non-technical end-users are people who either want to own or use a website to help them grow their business but have no need, want, interest, or desire to learn or mess around with technical stuff related to web development (e.g. coding, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, etc.).
Many don’t even care if their websites are built with WordPress or some other platform.
Most businesses with a website, however:
- Want to feel in control of their web presence, and
- Want better results from their websites.
This is where many promises to WordPress users can fail to be delivered or client expectations can fail to be met.
1. WordPress Users Want To Feel In Control Of Their Web Presence
Charles Revson, the co-founder of Revlon, one of the world’s leading beauty companies, used to say that “in the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.”
Websites, like cosmetics, are things. Hope is a feeling.
Website developers can give clients a feeling of being competent, credible, professional, trustworthy, caring, understanding, etc. but they can’t make users feel in control of their web presence because the feeling of being in control has to come from the client’s own experience, not the website developer’s.
Even if end-users decide to outsource every aspect of their web presence, without an understanding of the processes they’re outsourcing, this won’t help them feel in control of their web presence either.
2. WordPress Users Want Better Results From Their Websites
Unless the reason a client has for getting a website is to have a website because everyone else has a website, the more significant the investment, the better the results they will expect to be able to get from their websites.
Once again, even if a WordPress end-user chooses to outsource everything to experts and professionals, outsourcing does not guarantee that they will get better results from their websites, especially if the cost of outsourcing becomes so great that it ultimately erodes (or neutralizes) profits.
The only sustainable way to ensure that your clients will feel in control of their web presence and get better results using their WordPress websites is to empower them with effective WordPress training.
Now, before you say “Aaaahhh….but I already do this with all my clients!” consider the following…
Empowering WordPress End Users – More Than A Feeling
Just like in the song made famous by the group Boston, training clients or end-users is “more than a feeling.” No matter how great their website is, if your WordPress training doesn’t empower them, you could find yourself in a situation where you’ll close your eyes and they’ll slip away.
An empowered end-user is someone that knows how to use their WordPress website effectively and understands the processes involved in creating and improving results online. This user will feel in control of their web presence and be able to improve their results even if they choose to outsource everything.
Providing non-technical clients and end-users with effective and empowering training, however, is very challenging.
For a start, as we explain in the challenges of training clients to use WordPress, WordPress is continually changing and evolving. This makes keeping training content and documentation up to date very difficult.
Even WordPress’ own documentation team struggles to keep up in this area.
As we also explain in another article, when looked at from an end user’s perspective, WordPress is not easy to use.
And as if these challenges are not enough, the difficulty in providing non-techie clients with empowering training is compounded by the fact that most WordPress service providers focus on delivering technical services to clients, not on developing effective client training systems aimed at empowering their clients to become fully competent WordPress end-users.
Additionally, because WordPress assigns the responsibility of training end-users to the WordPress community, many new WordPress users only discover or experience the WordPress platform via their service providers. Since service providers have little to no financial incentive to empower their clients to the point where their services may no longer even be required, it’s reasonable to assume that most new WordPress users are not given effective and empowering training but something that is convenient for WordPress service providers to give instead of what the end-users actually need, want, or expect to receive from their service providers.
Finally and to top it all off, there is no objective way to quantify or verify the quality or effectiveness of the WordPress training that most end-users receive from their service providers. There are no industry-wide WordPress end-user studies, research, or surveys available to refer to either. This means that all we have to go by is what WordPress service providers tell us and so anyone providing outdated content and ineffective training can claim to provide great WordPress training and there is no way to tell if the training actually empowered the client and helped them improve their results or not.
So, WordPress client/end-user training is just a vast, uncharted wilderness in a technically-dominated landscape. This is why we say that it’s the invisible elephant in the room and why we believe that the challenges of training non-technical WordPress end-users constitute a threat to the sustainability and growth of the WordPress economy.
Providing Effective And Empowering WordPress Training
To help both WordPress service providers and WordPress end-users, WPTrainingManual.com has created the most comprehensive, detailed, and regularly updated WordPress step-by-step client and end-user training available.
We provide everything non-technical clients and end-users need to learn how to use their WordPress website more effectively, feel in control of their web presence, and get better results from their website.
For WordPress end-users, we provide The Complete WordPress Step-By-Step User Manual. This includes a 2,100+ pages downloadable PDF manual and access to our membership site with 130+ detailed online WordPress tutorials, access to a video library with over 2,000+ video tutorials, guided lessons, email courses, downloadable guides, and additional resources (e.g. checklists, templates, etc.) If you are an end-user looking for WordPress training that will empower you to feel in control of your web presence, go here to learn more.
For WordPress service providers, we offer all of the above and more with our Rebrandable WordPress User Manual, which delivers a fully hosted and fully managed “hands-free” WordPress client training solution allowing you to focus more time and resources on growing your WordPress business.
To learn more about WPTrainingmanual.com WordPress training, see these articles:
- See everything included in the “hands-free” WordPress client training package
- Learn about the benefits of using WPTrainingManual.com to train your clients
- Learn how to set your WordPress business apart from the competition using our WordPress client training product
- Learn how to sell more WordPress services and save time training your clients
- Learn how to train your clients remotely
- Learn how to start a WordPress training business working from home
- Learn ways to profit with WPTrainingManual.com’s WordPress client training
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum