Over the winter term I took a two day advanced course in WordPress Theme customization at Noble Desktop. For all of the the non techies, WordPress is a popular open source content management system used by bloggers and web site owners around the world. The popularity of WordPress is due to ability of the system to allow writers to easily be able to update and create new pages of web content without a having to be a programming guru. Developers like me love it because WordPress already provides us with a solid foundation under which we can rapidly build database driven web sites that are advanced and customizable.
The class was excellent. Noble Desktop is my “go to” place to take brush up classes in graphics and multimedia applications. I have taken numerous Adobe and Apple certified courses there in the past. While they have long been associated with Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash instruction, they have recently started adding more courses dealing with PHP based content management systems like WordPress and Joomla. The owner of Noble Desktop is a guy by the name of Scott Carson. One of the reasons that a have been a big fan of Noble is because Scott is extremely selective in the instructors he hires to teach at the school. The instructors all have to not only be experts in their respective fields, they also have to have that rare ability among trainers and be able to concisely explain complex technical concepts in laymen’s terms. The instructor for the WordPress class was a great guy named Chris Heinen who guided us through two days of intensive theme customization.
I am not easily impressed by many technical schools. In my experience the bad schools vastly outnumber the good ones. However that isn’t the case with Noble. My only regret was that I wasn’t able to take all of the courses that I had wanted because I was strapped after Christmas and my Mom’s birthday. Noble has two other classes on HTML Email and Creating eBooks for the iPad and Kindle that I plan to take in the future to facilitate a new eCommerce site I will launch by this summer (a brother has to get paid). Luckily Noble sells their course workbooks at a pretty decent price, and while not as good as an actual class, they can get you over the hump if you are relatively knowledgeable about computers.