No doubt you’ve seen us talk a lot about our WordPress specialists; as such you might have rightly asked, what does that actually mean? Is it just a fancy sales phrase we bolt onto our website to sell WordPress hosting? Does it actually mean anything of import? Do our support team really know WordPress?
If you’ve worked with our specialist team you’ll know the answer of course; we pour a significant amount of time and energy into ensuring our WordPress specialist team are the best in the business. Let’s look at what that means in practice.
First and foremost, our WordPress specialists actually have to complete an in-house formal training program before joining the team. The training process is a built around a combination of elements
All our specialists are expected to have a working knowledge of PHP/JS to the extent they’re capable of easily debugging
Training typically takes 6 months for an experienced existing member of our support team to complete. The exhaustive training concludes with a series of 4 practical exams; complex WordPress support cases modelled on real-world tickets from our nearly twenty years in business. The tests cover items such as setting up complex multisite migrations, fixing hacked sites with multiple backdoors, slow site performance issues and many more.
Once completed and certified our specialists are the spearhead of our WordPress website support, delivering internal training to other staff and engaging with the larger UK WordPress community too.
Indeed, specialists above all else need to be passionate and engaged with WordPress and the WordPress community. That means you’ll find them at the events we attend up and down the country, from local user groups through to WordCamp events and other tech-related conferences.
Once a WordPress specialist’s basic training is completed, that is just the start. Our team are encouraged to undergo continual professional development and training; further specialising and where possible taking professional certifications like the Red Hat Systems Administration and Engineer courses.
Do you do any training in WordPress? I have learned to use it to do a relatively simple job – publishing an online newsletter once a week – but I could do with a course in the upcoming Gutenberg system and other additional skills, like setting up an A-Z classified directory. Hard to fin.
At the current time, sadly no Christopher. Our training program is specifically geared towards working day in day out supporting our clients. Maybe that’s something we can consider for the future though!
I have a WP website that in badly in need of revamping. I have a new template that I don’t know how to use. Even the ‘parent/child’ concept in web design is confusing [even though I’m a really good human parent with children]. There are so many tutorials out there that make it even more confusing. Do you have easy to understand links and where should I start. I’m a photographer and a graphic arts student/designer, not a web guru.
Hi Rachel, drop us an email to support@34sp.com, I am sure we can point you in the right direction.