The Pleasant Oak WordPress Course — Build Your Own Website, No AI

Some owners want us to build the site. Some owners want to build it themselves — and they should be able to, without a monthly builder subscription and without handing the work to a chatbot.

So we wrote the course we give to friends who ask: how do I make a real website, with my own hands, that loads fast, shows up in Google, and still works in five years? Every step is done by a human. There is not a single AI prompt in this course.

Who this is for

• Owners who want to control their own website and stop paying someone $200 a month to change a phone number
• Anyone who has started a WordPress site, gotten lost in themes and plugins, and abandoned it
• Office managers and staff inheriting a site nobody understands
• Anyone who wants to know what is actually under the hood before hiring out the work

You do not need to code. You need a laptop, about $15 a month for hosting, and one evening a week for five weeks.

The five modules

Module 1 — Foundations. Domain, hosting, and the map before the build. The four decisions that determine whether your site is cheap to run for a decade or a monthly headache, plus a one-page sitemap you build against.

Module 2 — Install and set up WordPress the right way. A clean install, a hardened login, permalinks, and the eight settings almost everyone gets wrong on day one — including the single checkbox that keeps new sites out of Google.

Module 3 — Theme, layout, and pages that look designed. Block editor fundamentals, a type and color system decided once, and the five page patterns that carry a small business site. No page-builder license required.

Module 4 — Words, photos, and local SEO — written by you. How to write pages that rank and convert without a copywriter, how to prepare photos so the site stays fast, and the local trio that moves the Google map.

Module 5 — Speed, security, launch, and the maintenance hour. The five-plugin rule, caching, forms that actually reach you, a launch-day checklist, and the 60-minute monthly routine that keeps a WordPress site healthy for years.

What you also get

The build-order checklist so you never redo finished work. The plugin shortlist with free options named for each job. And the printable monthly maintenance hour — updates on staging, backup restore test, Search Console check, and the two pages worth refreshing each month.

How enrollment works

Three steps: join the Almanac newsletter, register your account, and pay once — $10, no subscription, lifetime access including updates as WordPress changes. Your account is where the course lives.

If you get halfway through and decide you would rather we built it, that is fine too — everything you learn here makes you a better client.