This "course" should have been -- for its lack of actual instruction, should have been -- a simple bullet list of "The 9 steps to building a website (after you have already mastered WordPress and its Themes, Plugins, and Widgets)." Nothing in this "course" actually told me how to do anything. In the end, I downloaded a book for $10 and learned WordPress on my own during my "weekend" website creation. It took a few more days to test 10 Themes but eventually I made it through. As to the peer review process, that is a total sham. It simply means two women (one, with doctoral degree in music!) put their names to this project to pad their CVs. All while the students are left to float in limbo waiting desperately for other students to "grade" their submissions. For every three-star student work, there were at least three that were woefully ridiculous: no links, links to Wikipedia, links to catalogs, etc. And all the while, the person actually waiting for a real peer review waits and waits.

Back in the day, I worked for the State University of New York; creating a graphic arts department in the Central Administration before computers became a common site on anyone's desktop. I was appalled that SUNY's name was associated with this course. The only reason I gave two and not one star was because the nine steps presented the "how to" in correct order. For some students, that might have been helpful in itself: organizing one's thoughts, doing a story board, etc. Being a stubborn person, once I paid my $29, I finished the course because it amused me to do so and I empathized with other students needing peer reviews to complete the course. The fact the Discussion Board was a list of students begging for peer reviews says it all. There was no learning from peer review.

The two girls don't even teach much. They just speak about what they plan on telling you, then give you links to read yourself without teaching the stuff itself (some links are outdated and have no content on them) and just bombard you with semi useless/kiddie assignments like 'create a moodboard' or 'pick an aspirational URL'. Like, people??? I'm here to learn how to develop and code child sites on wordpress and learn HTML. This is like a kindergarten!

So basically it cuts off. It's like it gives you part of the information and then drops off. They also speed through it much like my old math teacher in college whcih caused 73% of the class to drop. Now I'm in them mist of it Paid for blue host. Paid for my web name and it looks like I'm going to have to pay someone to finish it. So bascially what I got was a bunch of added on expenses and still no web site. I would not recommend this course.

1 out of 10.

A waste of time. If I cannot participate in discussions, forums, submit assignments, or give reviews, I might as well watch youtube lectures.

The course content was very poor as well. (this is based on the unpaid material)

This course should be scrapped and not offered as an unpaid course. Its a classical case of bait and switch.

I feel that I put a lot of effort into my first assignments and I wasn't given appropriate feedback considering my background in design compared to peers who only just started learning about website maintenance.

It is only centered on using wordpress to create a website, however it doesnt really focus on tools that are applicable in other websited building options.

There is not any teaching resource; not even links were to find accurate information. not any valuable advice to initiate. It is just a list of tasks.

Not enough explanations, direction of the course is rather vague throughout the course.

Taking this course is like getting lost across a ton of different websites!

Best module was Module 4 made by Coursera employees.

Not really helpfull

Based on the discussion forums I am not the only person experiencing these issues. First, there seems to be chunks of instruction missing. For example, there is a video explaining a module is about completing the home page, adding hyperlinks, etc. Then the assignment is to add links and submit. There is no instruction at all. That is a repeated cycle. Say something is due then assignment asking for it to be posted. Next, there is no response to posted questions on the discussion forum. I posted a question about an assignment due this week and found the same question posted by someone else a year ago - with no answer. The assignment asks us to submit our home page URL, but our sites are not live yet. We can't submit the site without going live and my site is not ready to go live. There are many many other topics/questions posted with no responses. People are really asking for help and not getting any. (Some, like me, paid for this course. Others did not.)

I write this in the hopes that students enrolled in this course get some help. I have been a big fan of Coursera and have told many people about it. Not sure that will happen going forward, it depends on how this is handled. Everyone makes mistakes, but you need to respond and recover.

Sorry to say that this is the worst Coursera Course I have ever taken, and I've taken quite a few. The instructors did not do a good job at explaining how to use Wordpress. They didn't explain how to use wordpress to make a website that looked more like a website than a blog. They didn't explain the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org even though they mentioned them both. They talked about hosting but didn't explain how to do it. They mentioned hosting on bluehost but didn't give any instructions. The few tidbits of information that they did give about using wordpress were so brief with no examples. They mentioned Jetpack but didn't say what it was. They didn't explain what benefit adding the social media icons would have or how to link them. And on I could go.

The only good part about this course was the last section where they had guest lecturers, some from Coursera - those were all excellent.

The most useless course I have ever could imagine! Lecture videos are very short and lack of any useful information. All this information may be found in the Internet, no, actually, you will never need this information, because if you gonna make a website on WordPress you will make it your own without prior experience or special knowledge. Or if you will have some problems with your work - WordPress has much better constructed tutorials, than this course.

Had a really awful experience with my classmate - who put me negative grades for assignments just for fun, although I made everything correct. This person was just having fun and himself posted Facebook as the site he has made for the course. So it was not only useless course, but also some very unpleasant experience complains, nerves, my work re-submission and waiting.

I'm sorry to say this is a poor course. The audio is bad, the sound editing is bad, the "videos" are mainly static slides that sometimes aren't even showing what the audio is talking about. There are no worked examples or annotated slides. As an example, there's no discussion of the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The only time that is mentioned is when they touch on plugins, where they say you can't use them if you started with WordPress.com! The additional lectures by guest website designers were the most interesting part, but they were supposed to be after the final project. I just gave up after less than an hour and went and played with WordPress myself. Created a website in 2 days, but with no help from this course.

This was the most poorly designed course that I have ever encountered. Whoever is in control of quality assurance was caught napping on this one - the instructors were woeful! It was as if the principles of instructional design and adult learning were abandoned entirely; there was minimal instruction and I had to rely on my intuition and the assistance of a study buddy to work hard to complete the course. If you are completely new to website design (as I was), prepare for a steep learning curve as you will be spending many hours preparing and organising your info - the title is deceptive and misleading!

Ann, Melbourne, Australia April 2016.

The main benefit of this course is crowd sourcing your web site plans with other students. This is done in the discussions. I had very few comments on my discussion posts. I believe this has become ineffective because of low student enrollment. (The course seems to have been out there for a while.) I did not see any instructor updates.

I think this course is the worst I have taken from Coursera. I think the instructors posted it as a self-maintaining entity and it is not. Students are not active in the Discussions. Apparently I am past the refund deadline so I just lost the money.

Don't make my mistake. Do not enroll in this course.

Couldn't finish the course, because of unrealistic peer grading expectations. You get picky, smart-alec students, who give you unreasonable marks, and then you have to race to get another submission in before peers have done their four allocated peer markings. It's a problem with coursera. They should make the expectation for the classes 30%. I've taken two courses quite seriously, and I've failed both. In my opinion I was willing to do the work, so I should have got my certificate. I'm passing uni, but I can't pass coursera courses. Coursera needs to make it easier to earn certificates.

This course does not live up to the high value that I've come to enjoy and expect at Coursera. The videos are read by the "teachers", so the inflections are wrong, making it very hard to follow. The videos are clipped short and cut off the words at the end. The information is given so quickly with terms not explained that a novice will likely not understand parts of it. I found no value here. There are far better tutorials on the web. I can't see how any college or university would respect any certificate from this course.

Despite all the bad reviews this course got I told myself to give it a try to refresh my antic prior knowledge and since it is for my personal usage and not a career I m not interested in a certificate. So I went through all the open sites which were extremely disappointing. Since I was warned by the reviews, I was not even tempted to pay to unlock further pages. I attended many interesting courses on Coursera, but this one is simply a waste of time from the very first moment.

I have completed this course and reason for low rating is what you learn from this course is same as reading 4-5 pages with images. Being a non-IT student, instructions provided in course was not sufficent for the Project and It was very hard for me to complete course, also to note that what I have learnt in this project is not that benefitial that I can create some other website. Hope I am able to help everyone, Regards.

I can't believe this course is aimed at people with no experience in building a website. The videos are actually slide shows and use too few screenshots. Had this been my very first introduction to how a website was built I would never have progressed any further than these lessons. Much more in-depth information is necessary, including step by step screenshots of various processes.

Terrible course.

The course is very disappointing and useless. The two lecturers are not explaining anything properly, they are just showing slides and handing out links.

The only useful part of the course is Module 4, which is outside the scope of the course and taught by guest lecturers.

I would not spend time on this course and instead find another source for learning WordPress.

Why is this $29.99?

I could have google or youtube FOR FREE better and user-friendly lessons

1st week is just "HERE CHECK OUT THESE BLOG/WEBSITE" follow by "OKAY HERE IS A TEST NOW DO GOOD"

Where is the help? Where are the teachers providing hand-on example to help me understand how to use Word Press?

This course is supposedly for newbies but there is virtually no instruction and if I didn't have a clear idea of a website already I would have been lost. I think the grading criteria at least in the first assignments, are a little wonky. i would unenroll but it doesn't allow me to.