[Techtalk] Helping non-techies with websites -- any experience?

[Eeva Järvinen]

Hi,


I try to avoid helping non-techies create websites - with one
exception.  If they're willing to go with Blogger or something else
really simple, or they're willing to pay for some professional help,
I'm willing to get them started up.

I'll explain why.

In my experience (I do website information architecture and CMS
process design for a living), almost everyone tends to forget about
the why.

Why do a website?

"I'd like to have a website" is, of course, a valid reason, but that
means that what you want is a toy to play around with, and that means
you need to learn all the odds and ends of messing about with
websites.  Almost all of my non-techie friends do not want to do that.
They do want to have something they can design themselves, but they
don't want to learn how to do it in a way that won't be a huge
headache in a year or so.  Unfortunately that's not an option.

If the non-techies want the website for a particular purpose (say, a
web shop for her stuff, or a blog, or a personal portfolio for
marketing her work), I can almost always point them to a
well-supported, well-managed solution that does cost them some money,
but they can also see what they get and how it adds value for them.
At which point it becomes a business decision.

What is not, IMO, sustainable, is a website where one can muck about
with the css, code, plugins and processes and expect *at the same
time* that everything will work out just hunky-dory.  And that's not
because I'm mean, that's because such a thing does not exist.  You can
have freedom, but that entails the freedom to break things and the
need to learn the techie stuff, OR you can have safety and ease, at
the cost of some freedom.  You can't have both.  And this is what,
IMO, many non-techies expect, and I don't want to be a part of it
because of the unending grief that ensues.


hth,
Eeva


On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 08:37:19PM -0600, Akkana Peck wrote:
> Hi, all --
> 
> Do you help non-techie friends create websites? With image galleries?
> 
> I have several non-techie artist friends who would like to set up
> websites to showcase their art, as well as other friends who want
> an easy way to maintain websites for organizations they volunteer for.
> 
> I'm never sure what to tell them, because I'm a geek and my own
> website is HTML with a smattering of PHP, Javascript, CSS and Python
> as needed, hosted on a VPS that my husband and I admin.
> 
> There are simple drag-and-drop type sites like Weebly, but what I've
> seen of those suggests that they're a hassle to maintain if it gets
> beyond a few pages, and they don't offer many options for styling.
> However, Weebly and GoDaddy do say they offer drag-and-drop image
> galleries.
> 
> At the other end, one friend is wondering if she should host at
> Wordpress.com, because she wants a professional looking site and
> likes all the styles they offer. I've helped a little on a site
> running on Wordpress on another server, and although I mostly stay
> away from the Wordpress admin (I mostly write backend PHP code for
> them) I do see what goes into choosing and installing plugins and
> themes, and it looks like a lot of work. Is that a lot easier when
> the site is hosted on Wordpress.com?
> 
> I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets asked about setting up
> websites. What do you tell your smart but non-techie friends?
> How about your extremely technophobic friends? (I suspect these
> may be two different answers, and I'm interested in both.)
> 
> Thanks for any insights!
> 
>         ...Akkana
> 
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