Mastering WordPress Development In Udemy
After years of buying Udemy courses without finishing them, a work challenge finally forced me to learn WordPress for real. Within two months, I went from knowing almost nothing about PHP to building custom WordPress themes and rebuilding our company website.
Wordpress / PHP
Since around 2017, I’ve been a frequent Udemy shopper. Their sales were hard to resist, with many courses priced around $10.99. I bought several courses over the years, mostly focused on design and JavaScript frameworks like ReactJS and VueJS. I always had the intention of learning them, but like many people, I struggled to actually finish the courses once work and life got busy.
Things changed when a challenge came up at work. Our company needed to rebuild its website, but we didn’t have a developer to help. The site was built on a custom WordPress theme, so I had no choice but to start learning WordPress quickly.
I went back to Udemy to find a course that could teach me the basics. One thing I learned early on was not to rely on the “Bestseller” label alone. Instead, I spent time reading course descriptions and previews to find something practical. That’s when I found Ali Alaa’s WordPress course. His teaching style was straightforward and focused on real examples, which made it much easier to follow.
For the next two months, I spent my evenings learning WordPress from scratch. I wasn’t familiar with PHP at the time, so there were plenty of moments when I got stuck. Stack Overflow became my go-to place whenever I ran into problems. Slowly, things started to make sense.
Eventually, I was able to build custom WordPress themes myself and understand how the whole system worked. This was a big improvement compared to relying on pre-made themes from agencies. While those themes were easy to use, they often included unnecessary files that slowed down the website.
The skills I learned from that course turned out to be very useful. Between 2019 and 2022, I built and customized WordPress themes for my company. I also helped redesign the Bizrate Insights website and worked on the Bizcoin app and website for Bizcoin Survey, one of Bizrate Insights’ projects.
Looking back, that Udemy course was a great investment. WordPress and PHP may not always be considered the newest technologies, but they remain powerful tools for building and managing websites. More importantly, the experience taught me how to learn quickly and solve problems along the way.
And like many things in tech, it all started with a $10.99 course.