Free SCIP Manuals for Web Design

We have three sets of web design workshops running at the moment, teaching people how to set up and run a website using Wordpress.com. The notes for this course are available for free download from a site we've created to support this training.

Wordpress.com is fairly easy to use and it has some great support pages, but we recommend the Dummies Guide for those who want to buy a book - mainly because this includes info on wordpress.com as well as running your own version of wordpress.

We have also published some of our own notes to help our learners, including:

1. Wordpress tips and how-to's - mainly for those things where we found the Dummies Guide less helpful;
2. A Guide to Running Your Own Community Website - tips about setting up your page, whether or not you use Wordpress.com, plus roles and responsibilites, launching your site and so on.

Both are available for download at scipdiy.wordpress.com.

Free Event: Microsoft Training Resources

There are lots of free training resources available through the
Microsoft site, as there are across the internet. Many can help staff
and volunteers support themselves when using common tools, but which
ones work best? Techsoup, based in the US, is running a free online
training event/webinar (what an ugly word) at which Microsoft staff
will guide you through what is available. It will take place at 7pm GMT
on Wednesday 10 June – register at the Techsoup site.

Wordpress stepping stones

SCIP has been down the DreamWeaver route for many years, but right now I think wordpress is the best short and medium term solution. I'm now looking at the progression route for an organisation starting without a website and would welcome views on what I'm thinking of:

1. Brand new org or never built a website before:

• wordpress hosted site to learn basics of posting stories, creating static pages, working with images, sharing tasks within a group, editorial issues, etc
• build test site to learn basics then rebuild launch site
• budget = 20 hours training + zero for website + 20 hours for group to launch site

2. Second generation site

• hosting wordpress on your own server [ie paying for hosting]
  
• want specific look and feel not available in word-press hosted themes, or functionality only available in specific widgets
• this requires some degree of expertise in managing and updating the site software, plus a decent host familiar with wordpress
  
• budget = 10 hours training + £100 pa hosting + 20 hours for group to re-launch site

3. Third generation site

• take control of the code on a self-hosted site
• buy in or learn CSS skills and other wordpress-related magic, eg to integrate site fully with a database, calendar, map, whatever
• budget = ? hours training [eg CSS] + £100 pa hosting + 40 hours for group to re-launch site

4. Moving on

• depending on the size of the organisation and its needs it may be necessary to move onto drupal, or some similar CMS, which will probably mean buying in much more expertise and support
• by this time the org should be muchy better at specifying and administering an appropriate solution, and therefore pay less and get more for their money.
• budget = ? £3k for group to pay agency

Any thoughts based on your experience?

I also wonder whether this model holds for small businesses?

Why Wordpress?

I'm planning a training course to help a community association learn how to build and run its own website. And I'm using a hosted Wordpress.com site as the platform for this training, as opposed to other possible solutions, suich as self-hosted Wordpress, Typepad, blogger, drupal, joomla, build your own in dreamweaver, etc. But why Wordpress?

After years if patiently explaining ftp to people who didn't want to know about ftp I'm hoping that choosing a theme and agreeing what pages to have on their site will be more useful, engaging and fruitful to most people than having to work through the back end techie bits or get to grips with html. It seems an ideal way of helping people understand the process from the front end side of things, like what it looks like and what it has on it, with more time to explain some of how it works and play with the CMS-style administration interface.

I run a wordpress-hosted site as ICT Champion, having previously used blogger for some time. I should say that I've also set up a self-hosted WP site and I did it in about an hour but that included 45 minutes finding and configuring an ftp client. Then I spent a lot of time downloading themes and widgets and wotsits and fixes and then uploading them and installing them and remembering passwords and whatever else. Then the latest version was released and I had to carefully back everything up, save everything in then right place and reinstall blah blah

Simple enough stuff to be sure, and offering a great deal of flexibility and control which I may well need at some time in the future, but I can't I can't tell you how much happier I am since I started using a wordpress-hosted site and working within its limitations.

The trickiest techie bits were working out how to have the blog entries appear on a page with a menu tab [by no means intuitive to me but actually just a couple of menu items in different parts of the system] and fruitlessly seeking ways of embedding javascripted stuff like google maps.

Aside from posting I now spend most of my time thinking about categories, which I realise need to drive my navigation much more than the page structure, and re-categorising old stories as I fiddle with my categories. [On which point Blogger has a much easier way of retro-categorising batches of stories than wordpress, which requires you to do one at a time.]

I can also look at promotion and content and editorial issues with a much clearer eye than when I used dreamweaver, when I seemed to spend a lot of time tidying up folders and playing with plugins etc.

By the way I have used Typepad, and I liked it, but it costs, which Wordpress doesn't, so it feels like a safer option for first timers. And I also tried blogger and it doesn't support static pages, so I think it's less interesting to people who want a website, not a blog.

And so I favour Wordpress, both as a nursery slope for people new to building a website, but also because it's probably good enough for most organisation's relatively modest needs.

And in case anyone needs evidence of people's modest needs I leave you with a link to a site which has been used to create a web site/presence by more community organisations than any other in our area - perhaps five times more than we have worked with ten years:
http://www.communigate.co.uk/sussex/viewgroup.phtml?group=3

This is a layer in the internet's geology which is technically outdated but remains a useful reminder of just what people in community organisations want to do on the internet and where they have to start if they're ever going to do it.

More soon on this as I start preparing the notes...