Some workshops at WordCamp promise practical outcomes and deliver slides. Jamie Marsland’s session at WordCamp US 2025 delivered an actual website. His hands-on workshop, “Launch Your Personal Portfolio”, walked every attendee from a blank screen to a fully published WordPress portfolio site in a single session. I attended both the contributor day and the main conference day at WordCamp US 2025, and what struck me about this workshop was how completely Jamie dismantled the idea that building a professional website is technically intimidating.
About Jamie Marsland
Jamie Marsland is Head of WordPress YouTube at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. With over 150,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, he is one of the most recognized educators in the WordPress community today.
His career spans both technical and commercial leadership, including roles as Managing Director at Pavilion Publishing Ltd and CTO at Documedia PLC. As the founder of Pootlepress, he has developed WordPress plugins used by thousands of people worldwide and has taught WordPress to more than 5,000 students over the past decade. His core focus areas are digital strategy, online business development, and WordPress education.
The Workshop: Zero to Published in One Session
The premise was direct: every attendee would leave with a real, live, publicly accessible portfolio website. No coding required. No prior WordPress experience assumed.
Jamie structured the session as a guided build, moving through the full process in sequence so participants could follow along on their own machines. The topics covered:
- Understanding posts, pages, and the block editor
- Building site structure and navigation
- Choosing and applying themes and plugins
- Customizing layouts with Gutenberg blocks
- Creating a team page, contact page, and portfolio section
- Configuring menus, the homepage, and global styles
No code. No shortcuts that require a developer to maintain later. Just a clear, repeatable sequence that produces a professional result.
Watch the Full Workshop (English)
Why This Approach Works
A lot of creative professionals — writers, photographers, designers, consultants — postpone building their online presence because they assume web development is more technically demanding than it actually is with modern WordPress. Jamie’s workshop addresses that directly, not by oversimplifying, but by showing the right sequence of decisions. When you know what order to do things in, the process stops feeling overwhelming.
By the end of the session, every participant had a functioning portfolio published on the internet. Not a draft. Not a test environment. A real site, ready to share with potential clients or employers.
That kind of immediate, tangible outcome is exactly what makes WordCamp educational sessions valuable at their best. You arrive with a goal and leave with the thing itself.
Jamie Marsland’s Resources
- Website: pootlepress.com
- YouTube: youtube.com/@jamiewp
Bonus from Jamie Marsland
If you want to go further, Jamie recently published a practical guide on 10 ways to use the Perplexity Comet AI browser with WordPress — worth a read if you’re exploring how AI tools fit into a WordPress workflow.
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