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WordPress is an excellent CMS and one of the most popular blogging platforms available. WordPress is free, open-source, extremely extendable and it gives the clients control over the content of their own website. It is quite user-friendly, it provides flexibility, you can use hundreds of plugins and last but not least it has a huge support community. With all those positive attributes how can you not simply like it. However it can be a little bit different for your clients. While you are probably fully comfortable in managing, editing, and adding content, most of your clients probably will be regular people not technically savvy and may find WordPress hard to use. So part of our job would be to make things easier for these people for their better overall user experience with WordPress.
Here are some useful tips:
Teach your clients how to effectively use WordPress
Like we have mentioned previously WP may seem pretty simple to us but many clients will have no idea what to do in WP without instructions. There are many tutorials that can guide clients through the process of editing and adding content but the best thing would be you to walk them through the process avoiding the unnecessary and not that necessary stuff and by that building an active minimum of knowledge upon which they can upgrade individually and gradually later. Here are some of the resources where they can easily learn more about WordPress -
Simplify the Admin’s Interface as much as possible
At the beginning of their WordPress adventure most of the users don’t care much about things like WordPress development blog updates, the latest plugins etc. That’s a lot of irrelevant information on the dashboard. Your goal is to set up the dashboard so that when the client logs in, they’re not overwhelmed with unnecessary information, but only the information they really need to see on it, hence “the active minimum”, so remove those from the dashboard for the time being. Here are some of the plugins through which you can minimize the dashboard.
Separate the Users
If your client’s organization has multiple users you’ll need to set up multiple user accounts so that each person can post content on their own. WordPress has a Roles feature which is designed to give the blog owner the ability to control and assign what users can and cannot do in the blog. A blog owner must manage and allow access to such functions as writing and editing Posts, creating Pages, defining Links, creating Categories, moderating Comments, managing Plugins, managing Themes, and managing other users. This way you can separate the technical and administrative functions (managing plugins, overall site settings, etc.) from the content-related.
WordPress has different roles by default, however there can be times when you’d not want to give certain privileges to a specific role. Members plugin by Justin (link given above) will help you in making those adjustments pretty easily.
Install the proper plugins and minimize their number when possible
Depending on the client and his type of blog there may be plugins that you know will make it easier for them to do something they need to on the administrative side, so make sure to install them. However sometimes plugins can be a problem especially when it comes to upgrading them. So stick to necessary plugins that are used regularly and save your client from additional problems.
Explain the WP Upgrades
WordPress needs to upgrade from time to time, not because of fashion but because of enlarging its potential and consequently making it even easier for the users, but don’t forget that this sometimes can be an issue for your client so be sure to explain the need to upgrade periodically and how it can be done.
