SIDEKICK Pro – An Interactive Walk Thru

Have you ever stumbled on a website and wonder what in the world this is all about? Or say to yourself “O great! Another website for such and such service and why do I need it”?

Well, that’s what happen to me when I found SIDEKICK, an interactive walkthrough plugin for WordPress. At first I didn’t know what to think of it because I’ve been using WordPress when it was consider a blogging platform. For me, most of what WordPress has to offer is pretty straight forward and simple and our clientele rely on us to maintain and update their website. So there really wasn’t a need for me to even consider using such a service like SIDEKICK Pro.

But then I started to think “what if one of our clients wanted to do add picture and make changes or add a post or whatever it is that the client wants to do for themselves”? After all, it is their website and even though they have maintenance plan with us, they are still given everything they need to access their site.

Except for one crucial element – “How do I . . .”

Welcome to SIDEKICK, an interactive, hand holding, here’s how you do this, challenge accepted, walkthrough plugin for your WordPress website. SIDEKICK is literally that!

The setup; wait there isn’t one!

Once SIDEKICK is installed and the plugin is activated you’re prompted with the SIDEKICK Dashboard. By the way, there’s no setup, no asking for your email, no activation code for your FREE account, nothing. There’s no setup what so ever on your part making this plugin an ease to install and start using right away. You can, however, click on the box to provide data to help improve SIDEKICK but it’s optional.

Did I mention free? Right. The plugin allows 25 free walkthrough’s without any limitation. These walkthrough’s range from “How do I add a post or a page?” to “How do I change a theme?” and “How do I add media from my computer?” More than enough to get a person using WordPress for the first time started without feeling intimidated. There is an option to upgrade and for $36 a year, it’s well worth the coin and fits anyone’s budget.

How does this thing work anyhow?

That’s also easy. To get started, click on the HELP ME button on the lower left of the admin menu. Once clicked, the HELP ME button expands to what I like to call the “HELP ME” bar. This bar will have a close button, a Composer button (currently only supported by Chrome), a link to SIDEKICK.pro website and control buttons that acts just like your DVD player – stop, play and a rewind. Once you click on a “How do I . . .” in the walkthrough menu, the step by step audio starts and you follow the orange marker that walks you through the task.

So what’s the big deal?

What makes SIDEKICK such a big deal is that it actually walks you through each step of a certain task, for example “How do I add a post?”, until the walkthrough is completed. During that process you are unable to do anything else until you are done with that step by step walkthrough. You can, however, stop the process by clicking the stop button on the bottom of the HELP ME bar in which the walkthrough menu reappears. You can also pause the walkthrough just in case your attention is needed elsewhere. If you missed anything from the audio, you can rewind to the beginning and start over. Another feature is during the step by step walkthrough, is on the HELP ME bar will show you the time remaining on the tutorial that you are on. The longest walkthrough that I found was to 2 minutes and 30 seconds which was “How do I add a post”. Pretty sweet compared to trying to explain that function for a client over the phone or at their place of business.