First workshop delivered

Aug 19, 2009

On Friday 14th August 2009 I ran the first of our web design workshops in Morpeth, Northumberland. Instead of people with enterprise ideas, the recipients were the Business Advisers who work in offices across the region supporting SMEs. This made things quite tricky, as their motivations for attending were different to the intended audience. The group of 17 ranged in ability from techno-phobe to rockstar computer user.

On the whole things went well. As a result of this pilot the content will probably change slightly (I think the curriculum was a little hopeful). The Introductory workshop will now focus on the role of a website in a business and the impact of design, whilst the advanced workshop will contain all the technical stuff about building a site, customising templates and managing content.

The biggest success for me was the technical implementation. I have written a shell script to install multiple, bespoke copies of Wordpress and setup all the databases so that each learner can work on their own site and can then retrieve it at a later date when they have sorted out a domain name and web hosting etc.