Website Design Training – One To One
One of the benefits of being well known in the local area is that we often get asked to provide one to one training for individuals or companies that are looking to build and maintain websites in-house.
Last week was no exception, a call from a local business interested in getting some basic WordPress training for a new member of staff.
The location for the training for this client was to be away from the office and convenient for both my venue of choice in the town centre is the Swan Hotel.
The Swan Hotel is a great place to just sit drink coffee, watch the world go by, or as I do, catch up on work via the laptop. The building is 18th Century located in the centre of town overlooking the Great River Ouse, service is always first class and week days are always comfortable without being crowded.
The journey from the offices of Nettonic to the town centre takes about 10 minutes, today I was lucky, phoning ahead and speaking with my old mate resulted in a reserved parking place by the front door. I am not lazy and the rest but today the two-hour training session was to be followed by another 15 drive to catch up with another client.
I met David in the lounge area at 1:30 pm he had already been there for 15 mins, lap top fired up, notepad open and pen poised to take notes. A fresh-faced media graduate who managed to find a marketing role with a local estate agent. Luckily for both of us, we didn’t need to waste time on me getting to know what he wanted, that had been discussed during a short telephone conversation the week earlier. In short, his expertise was limited and his knowledge of WordPress sites was even less. My brief was to show him around the website, which we incidentally had built 6 months earlier, show him how to make minor security updates and upload/edit blogs, posts and images.
I had been instructed by his boss to provide him administration access recommendation but what do I know. WordPress comes with a user management system where you can determine what a specific user can and cannot do on the website. When you install WordPress, there are five default user roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor or Subscriber. While i am always happy to grant Admin rights to any user, who am i to refuse this does come with dangers and also with me getting an achnowledgementfrom the site owner that Nettonic would not be resonsible for any accidental damage or deletions. The reality is but no need to tell clients is that regular backups do allow siteto be restored if the circumstance prevails.
90 mins later David was slightly more WordPress wise than he was when we first met. To his credit he was a quick learner and had no problem understanding the basics of how to add new pages and blogs and poplulate with images.
One point he did raise was about content and how to best optimise for the seach engines that visit the site. I agreed to discuss this with his boss in an attempt to persuase him to pay for another couple of hours of my time