Omniversity of Manchester

WordPress for Beginners

WordPress co-founder Mike Little returns for our two-saturday ‘WordPress for Beginners’ course on the 22 and 29th of June. Demand for Mike’s courses has been high, and it’s a real opportunity when we can drag him away from his other high-profile clients (you know Number 10 is WordPress powered, right?).

This two-day introduction takes you through the process of installing, planning and customising your own WordPress site, teaching you how to install this yourself on your own host and giving you the maximum customisation and behavioural flexibility. Mike teaches the key elements of creating content with WordPress,  from embedding media to an exploration of the different types of content and engagement it offers – pages, posts and comments.

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Securing funding for your project or organisation is never simple, and with cutbacks and austerity in the air things are not getting easier. Thankfully, we’ve been able to arrange an exclusive full-day workshop with Laura H. Drane, decorated veteran of the bid-writing process. Laura has won bids from £500 to £500,000 in her years of experience, supporting organisations including Manchester Science Festival, Jodrell Bank and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The techniques and lessons from her successful methodology will be taught through a number of applied exercises and activities, as delivered to the RSA, the Clore Leadership Programme, and British Science.

This is the first time this course will be offered to the general public – usually being delivered to corporate clients – by Laura. However, we’re not just giving you the opportunity to learn from Laura first-hand; you’ll be able to directly address the challenges in the real-world bids you’re actively writing, if you’re currently putting one together (we’ll ask you for the application paperwork in advance). This provides access to expert support for your bid-writing, which would exceed the cost of the course alone; we’re offering it as an optional component of a broader programme, showing real-world best practices and sharing hard-earned tips and techniques.

UPDATE: This course is now available on the 13th May 2013. Please see this link for the syllabus and sign-up information.

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Omniversity is proud to welcome back Adrian McEwen, creator of the Bubblino to run an advanced Arduino course exploring the Internet of Things.

If you are looking to start on your own internet connected projects, this is the course for you. It is aimed at those with a working knowledge of Arduino who are looking for new ideas and know-how to take their skills in the world of internet linked Arduino further. Want to make a Weasley family clock to keep an eye on what everyone’s up to? Inspired by neat projects like the Twitter Drummer? You’ll find out about all the techniques you’d need and more at this course.

Since 1995, Adrian has been working in connecting devices to the internet, from cash registers to bubble machines. He currently shares his expertise working on diverse projects at companies such as Motorola to Good Night Lamp. Of late he’s even been published and his book, ‘Designing the Internet of Things‘ is available at all good bookstores. You can keep up to date with his work by following his blog.

The course costs £135 which includes an Ethernet Shield, wires and various other bits and a delicious lunch. You’ll also be able to purchase an Ardunio Uno on the day at MadLab if you haven’t got an one of your own. A word for the wise – you will need to be familiar with Arduinos before attending this course as it will not go over the basics (but fear not, there is always the Beginners’ Guide to Arduino and Physical Computing that will be taking place on the 27th April).

We hope to see you there and look forward to admiring the your amazing feats of internet connected engineering wizardry!

You can book a place on the course here.

For those of us who sigh with envy when visiting yet another site where style perfectly complements substance, it was a brilliant opportunity to receive a lesson from the best in how it’s done. Chris Mills ran an all day course that took complete newcomers to CSS from the very basics of selectors, properties and values to much more advanced concepts such as specificity and learning how to style forms.

It was a really great session where not only did those of us who attended learn how to create beautiful and more accessible websites, but we also got to meet people with a wide range of interests, bouncing ideas off each other and generally having a good time.

Though the course was a bit heavy going at times, with Chris’ great sense of humor and helpful attitude, we all left thoroughly satiated and able, ready to go out into the world to code and style our websites.

The CSS course continues with Advanced CSS, another one day course on the 3rd November. It’s aimed at those already familiar with CSS who want to get ahead with the new features in CSS3. Chris will go through a series of more advanced topics which will include animation and transforms, CSS sprites and responsive web design. The course costs £100 which includes teaching material, software and a delicious lunch. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, book your place here.

Hear ye, hear ye! Chris Mills, open standards evangelist and Omniversity tutor par excellence has recently been published by Peachpit, a specialist publisher that deals in technology textbooks, ebooks and videos for creative people.

Chris has run a series of web design foundations course for the Omniversity, from HTML basics to Advanced CSS. The latest on offer are the CSS Basics, an all day introductory session to the marvels of CSS starting on Saturday 13th October, and the Advanced CSS course, starting on the 3rd November. His new book, ‘Practical CSS3: Develop And Design’ is available both in print and as an ebook and can be bought here.

What’s so special about yet another programming textbook, I hear you cry? In the words of the author himself:

Practical CSS3 was written with three main purposes in mind. I wanted to create a usable snapshot of where the CSS3 landscape is in 2012, and what we can use now in modern web sites. I [wanted to] promote open standards and associated best practices, for example using vendor prefixes responsibly, so … you don’t needlessly limit your styling to only working in one browser. And finally, I wanted to thoroughly look at how you can use CSS3 features but still ensure that your core content and features are accessible in older browsers like IE6, something a lot of books don’t give enough attention to.

Check out his blog for more details and more importantly, buy his book!

Check out our new video featuring Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress and developer extraordinaire about the upcoming WordPress courses at the Omniversity.

WordPress at the Omniversity with Mike Little from Prohyena on Vimeo.

This autumn we are running WordPress for Beginners, a two day course (22nd – 23rd September) where you will cover all the basic skills that you need to develop your first WordPress site. Following that is the Intermediate WordPress (20th-21st October) course, perfect for those wanting to further hone their skills in WordPress.

Next year we plan to run Advanced WordPress and WordPress for Developers, so stay tuned for more information. Drop us a line if you are would like us to contact you about these courses.

Book a place for the WordPress for Beginners’ course here.

Book a place for the Intermediate WordPress course here.

This autumn the Omniversity will be running two CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) courses: CSS Basics and Advanced CSS.

CSS enables web developers to create imaginative, beautiful and accessible websites. CSS makes it easy to change the style of a website and by separating style and layout from basic HTML content, reduces server bandwidth requirements, ensuring faster downloads.

Both courses will be run by Chris Mills, open standards evangelist, tech writer and developer relationship manager at Opera Software. Chris edits dev.opera.com and writes articles on open-web technologies for his own site A List Apart, .net magazine and more. He is the author of Practical CSS3: Develop and Design (Peachpit Press, 2012) and co-authored Interact with Web Standards (New Riders, 2010).

Chris is passionate about web education. He is the creator of the Opera web standards curriculum and member of W3C group The Open Web Education Alliance. Chris has over 10 years’ experience working with HTML and CSS, including future-facing technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

CSS Basics

CSS Basics will be held on Saturday October 13th at Manchester Digital Laboratory and costs £100.

It will look at the basics of CSS and teach fundamental theory such as the box model, the cascade, specificity and the basics of layouts using floats and positioning. The sessions will also cover some CSS3 features such as shadows, border radius and CSS3 selectors.

It’s expected that you will have a reasonable knowledge of HTML already and know how to use the web. So, if you’d like to move beyond basic HTML, or you’ve always been intrigued by what’s current in web development come along and check it out. No prior knowledge is required but it might help with learning the theory a bit quicker!

Advanced CSS

The Advanced CSS course takes place on Saturday November 3rd at Manchester Digital Laboratory and costs £100.

It’s the ideal course for those who already have a working knowledge of HTML and an understanding of CSS Basics. What you’ll gain is a knowledge of advanced CSS techniques and CSS3 features, vital parts of a toolbox that will enable you to use cutting edge CSS3 techniques in your future web development.

Advanced CSS will take you further in your knowledge of CSS. You’ll get a look at features including multi-column layouts, flexbox, CSS sprites, advanced web font usage, responsive web design and CSS3 transitioning.

Both courses include lunch and refreshments. You will receive an electronic copy of the teaching materials as well as the relevant software. Free hosting will be provided by MadLab, enabling you to test and refine your site.

Chris Mills will be running HTML5 courses at Omniversity in 2013. Details will be up on the site soon. If you’d like to be kept up-to-date, please drop us a line with your email address.

This autumn the Omniversity will be hosting two writing courses in association with Comma Press.

The Short Story Writing Workshop, back for the third time at MadLab, will be run by critically acclaimed writer Zoe Lambert whose collection The War Tour was recently shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2012. This evening course will be held on the second Tuesday of the month from 10th September to 11th February (inclusive) and costs £150.

A newcomer for this semester is the Poetry Writing Workshop led by Gaia Holmes, Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield whose second collection of poetry is soon to be released by Comma Press. This evening course will be held on the second Monday of the month from 11th September to 12th February (inclusive) and costs £150.

September is back to school at the Omniversity with some brilliant upcoming courses featuring our usual array of dazzling experts. Commencing the new semester is the ‘Beginners’ Guide to Arduino and Physical Computing’ course on 1st September 2012 from 10 am – 5:30 pm.

Join in and learn everything you ever needed to know about working with the Arduino platform – from software development to building robotics – and no previous experience is required. Once you’ve covered the basics, you’ll learn ways of actively incorporating what you’ve learned into future projects of your own, whatever the application might be, from creating art installations to kick-starting the robot apocalypse.

Check out our Arduino video if you want to get a bit of a taste for it:

The past weekend saw a group of novices gather together from far and wide to learn the secrets of WordPress from none other than one of its co-founders, Mike Little.


The ‘WordPress for Beginners’ workshop was pitched as an introductory course to WordPress and it certainly didn’t disappoint. The course covered pretty much everything the uninitiated would need to know, starting from the basics such as creating a post to more advanced topics such as themes and plug-ins, with a dash of CSS editing for those interested in taking their skills further. We started with learning how to install WordPress (and yes, it can be done within five minutes or in the case of this demonstration, with about a minute spare!), coming to grips with the basic anatomy of the blog formatted website and learning how to navigate the dashboard and what the various types of content were. All the features were gone over in great detail and we were regularly given the opportunity to have a go at configuring our WordPress sites.

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