(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)

Ask Anca is a column written by WordPress expert Anca Mosoiu. Anca is owner of  Tech Liminal (where you can come and ask these types of questions in person every Friday at the WordPress Support Group).

This week, we’ll start covering one of the more fundamental questions involved in building a WordPress site:

“Hi Anca,

How do I pick a theme if I want to customize my site?

A. Designer”

This question has a complicated and lengthy answer that boils down to “it depends”¹.

Here are some things that you can ask yourself to help you get closer to the right answer for you:

1. What are you trying to do with your site?

Are you writing a blog?  Building a site for your consulting business?  Running events?  Trying to market your storefront business?

Using a theme designed for blogging to create a site that needs a different structure (or different kinds of pages with sidebars) can cause a great deal of stress.  For example, the Memoir theme from ElegantThemes is just gorgeous – but if you find yourself needing a 3-column page for your homepage, you’ve got to do some major surgery.

Which bring us to the next question:

2. What’s the shape of your content?

Along with your content strategy, you should also consider the structure, or shape of your content.   Are you writing long blocks of text, or planning to display photos, videos, or your design portfolio?    Do you want to showcase your 16 products in a 4×4 grid?

The structure of your site (i.e. which pages have which sidebars, whether you can have multiple layouts for pages, whether you can move things around) is coded in the guts of the theme. You can change a bit of this around with plugins – but if you aren’t careful you’ll wind up taking on the overhead of managing many moving parts.

WordPress.org’s theme repository lets you search for themes by the number of columns, which can be very helpful if you want to add widgets for supporting content or advertising.  You may also look to see if you can change the number of columns or their position. Notice whether you can make these changes to the entire site (Twenty Eleven, Thesis) or on a page-by-page basis (Genesis, Weaver).

3. How important is total control over the look of your site?

No matter how perfect your theme is, you may wind up wanting to make a change to the look or the structure on one or more pages.  If you get to this point, consider:

3.a. What’s your skill and comfort level with programming?

Many themes promise “easy” customization, but most deliver only a limited set of options².   Working with a theme like Weaver, Suffusion, or Atahualpa is great because you can change colors, fonts, and sizes from within the dashboard interface with a UI, without the need to know any “technical” stuff.  A theme like Platform (from PageLines) that comes with drag-and-drop design is also an option.

As you get more familiar with CSS, HTML, JavaScript and PHP (and maybe a little bit of SQL), you can achieve more control over your site. Many web designers can get by with a good understanding of CSS, followed by the ability to recognize snippets of PHP code and move them around to meet their needs.

4. What do I use?

As a programmer, I prefer Genesis from StudioPress over other frameworks – while it’s complex to modify for a non-developer, it’s well-structured and has some very useful widgets (Featured Posts and Pages FTW!)  to make it a great framework for building many different kinds of sites. It’s “easy” if you’ve put in the time required to learn CSS and PHP.  Otherwise, it can be downright inscrutable because it’s VERY different from other, more typical WP themes.

Another theme that I use fairly often is Weaver. Why? It’s great for people who want to create a site that they can customize visually. Weaver comes with several page templates that allow you structure different kinds of pages. For slightly more advanced users, it also comes with a shortcode you can use to pull content from the database and put it in any page or sidebar. Super-awesome if you want to, say, create a homepage that includes only posts from certain categories, or a homepage that looks different from other pages on the site.

What you can’t get away with when choosing a theme is the need to develop a basic understanding of how WordPress works – the difference between Posts, Pages, and Attachments, or between Categories and Tags. Armed with this knowledge, plus Weaver, you can build many lovely sites for yourself and your customers.

More about WordPress themes on Website In A Weekend

We’ve written quite a bit about WordPress themes. Here’s a selection of articles going into more detail:

• There are more technical criteria for choosing a WordPress theme, which you should also be aware of.
• Dave Thackeray gives us pixel perfection with Atahualpa theme (Inca strictly optional).
• Thesis
• Dave Thackeray also loves Headway theme (two timer!).
• The Journalist theme, by Lucian Marin, is a long-standing favorite of thousands of bloggers. Lightweight, looks good, and easy to customize.

What about you?

What’s your favorite WordPress theme, and why?

Anca Mosoiu runs Tech Liminal, a technology salon in downtown Oakland, CA, where people just like you can get help with their websites, web applications, and general technology concerns. She is translating her background as developer, analyst, and information architect working on large-scale corporate web applications into practical, straightforward tools for the motivated entrepreneur and small-business owner.

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Choosing Your WordPress Theme (4 questions to ask)

(Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes)

(Ask Anca is a column written by WordPress expert Anca Mosoiu. Anca is owner of  Tech Liminal, a co-working space and technology hotspot.)

“Hi Anca,

How does WordPress Work?

Lucy V”

Hi Lucy V,

While this is a deep and involved question, I like to start with a simple, graphical answer.

In a nutshell:

You edit content in the dashboard. It goes to a database, where the front end of WordPress combines it with a theme and your plugins. This produces a page that the readers will see.

Anca Mosoiu runs Tech Liminal, a technology salon in downtown Oakland, CA, where people just like you can get help with their websites, web applications, and general technology concerns. She is translating her background as developer, analyst, and information architect working on large-scale corporate web applications into practical, straightforward tools for the motivated entrepreneur and small-business owner.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Ask Anca: How Does WordPress Work? An Infographic

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

“Ask Anca” is a column written by WordPress expert Anca Mosoiu. Anca is owner of Tech Liminal, a co-working space and technology hotspot.

Anonymous asked:

“Should I use WordPress to replace my entire HTML site or just for my blog?”

That’s a great question. My answer?

Yes, you should use WordPress to replace your HTML site. Here are several advantages:

• You minimize the time you spend changing HTML code and making sure that all of your links. With WordPress, you choose (or build) a theme and then add pages, blog posts and images.  (You don’t have to worry about breaking the framework of your site or having to update lots of pages when you need to change a single link.)

• You don’t need any special software to use WordPress – the web interface works from anywhere.

• WordPress provides a reasonably simple text editor with formatting buttons. It provides the ability to load images and link to video and audio.

• There’s a form plugin that you can use to create simple contact pages. These pages allow people to contact you and send you information.  There’s no programming required, so you can set these up on your own.  Here are some example forms that we’ve built using this plugin:
• Pacific Pearls - contact form with reseller information
• Lakeshore Avenue Business Improvement District – just a basic contact form.

If you want to make a change that will affect your entire site (like a different header image or a color or font), you make that change to the site theme in one place. It’s immediately available all across your site.  Even if you want to change the look completely, you won’t have to rebuild all of your pages from scratch.  The content in WordPress is stored in a database, separate from the look and feel.

Anca and her team are available for all of your WordPress needs. Contact Tech Liminal or leave a comment below.

Anca Mosoiu runs Tech Liminal, a technology salon in downtown Oakland, CA, where people just like you can get help with their websites, web applications, and general technology concerns. She is translating her background as developer, analyst, and information architect working on large-scale corporate web applications into practical, straightforward tools for the motivated entrepreneur and small-business owner.

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Ask Anca: Replacing static HTML sites with WordPress

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

“Ask Anca” is a column written by WordPress expert Anca Mosoiu. Anca is owner of Tech Liminal, a co-working space and technology hotspot.

What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?

This is one of the questions I get from people new to WordPress. The answer can get somewhat detailed, so I made a handy-dandy diagram to help explain it:

You can click to get a bigger version to print or download.

For more technical details, you can read more on WordPress.com.

Anca Mosoiu runs Tech Liminal, a technology salon in downtown Oakland, CA, where people just like you can get help with their websites, web applications, and general technology concerns. She is translating her background as developer, analyst, and information architect working on large-scale corporate web applications into practical, straightforward tools for the motivated entrepreneur and small-business owner.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

A Visual Explanation of The Universe of WordPress

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

“Ask Anca” is a column written by WordPress expert Anca Mosoiu. Anca is owner of Tech Liminal, a co-working space and technology hotspot. This is the first on several Ask Anca columns we have in store for you, stay tuned for more.

Pat C______ wrote:

WordPress forum seems to be having issues today. Maybe someone in this group can help.

I am setting up a WordPress website for a frame shop. The owner is an artist and has a personal website that is at www.sales@xxx-energy.com. We want to incorporate it as pages in the new website without breaking it into WordPress pieces. Can a traditional website be uploaded “as is” into the WordPress structure?

Pat C______

Hi Pat,

The short answer is “No”.

What’s the long, hypothetical answer? If you have a traditional HTML website, you can load each of the pages into WordPress, but you’ll have to tweak the HTML as follows (it might not work the way you expect, or even be worth the trouble).

1. Go through and remove the section, retaining only stuff that’s inside the tag. Even better would be to extract the part of the HTML that’s the content, leaving the navigation and sidebars to be rebuilt by WordPress – but this is not the question you’re asking.
2.  In the WordPress editor, paste this HTML into the HTML tab for that page. Save your page. Note the new URL for each page you’re creating this way.
3. At this point, you should have something that looks like your old site, minus any CSS. You’ll also have a whole bunch of broken links.
4. For the URL in each page, replace with the new WordPress URL (which may be different from the old site’s URL). For example, http://mystaticsite.com/about.html might become http://mywpsite.com/about. *. Important: Use the HTML version of the editor; switching to Visual may break some of your careful formatting.

WordPress will add things around this page content – menu navigation, sidebars, etc. (which have their own HTML, based on the theme you’ve selected).

Next, you’ll have to tweak the CSS to combine your theme with your old site’s CSS.

Which is sort of the equivalent of stuffing an elephant inside a duck using only a hammer.

You’re definitely better off breaking it up into WordPress pieces and doing it that way. There are several things you can do make this job easier once you understand a little bit about WordPress.

Cheers,

Anca.

* Note: You can use the Search and Replace plugin to make the task of replacing URLs in content a little bit easier.

Anca Mosoiu runsTech Liminal, a technology salon in downtown Oakland, CA, where people just like you can get help with their websites, web applications, and general technology concerns. She is translating her background as developer, analyst, and information architect working on large-scale corporate web applications into practical, straightforward tools for the motivated entrepreneur and small-business owner.

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Ask Anca: Static HMTL into WordPress

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

If Website In A Weekend has one highest hurdle, it’s finding a venue which meets the technical challenge (i.e., number of seats, high speed wireless) at a price point profitable for holding seminars. Anca Mosoiu provides just that venue: Tech Liminal. Just as I’ve spent two years building content and competence, Anca has spent two years building a viable brick and mortar tech salon, a perfect venue for Website In A Weekend Workshops.

Note: This is “website in a weekend,” not “wordpress in a weekend.” WordPress is awesome to be sure, but when it’s overkill, we steer clients toward more appropriate website platforms for their businesses.

Here’s Anca with her perspective on websites.

Three types of websites you can build in one weekend

-by Anca Mosoiu

Now that you’ve written out your website goals, let’s figure out what type of site will provide you with the best tools to accomplish them.

If, like me, you resist blogging with a passion, it’s useful to realize that your website doesn’t have to be a blog (or have one). Your website needs to support the kind of business you run, and it needs to get you the right results. Sometimes that means engaging people all over the world through comments, and sometimes it means making sure that hungry customers know where your restaurant is and how late it’s open.

Let’s look at a couple of sites that aren’t blogs to see what I mean. Each of these sites could be built in a weekend, provided you have the assets handy.

Pattern 1: Basic Informational Site

Sometimes called an online brochure, an informational site provides a visitor with a first impression of your business, tells them what you have to offer, and establishes the mood of your interactions. This type of site doesn’t need to be updated very often, but you should spend time carefully crafting your content so people can find you through search.

An effective example is Zero Emissions Renewable Energy. This site for a green energy startup provides information for investors. The company invested in a nice graphic that helps an impromptu pitch presentation, but also allows people to learn on their own.

Zero Emissions Renewable Energy website provides important information to prospective investors.

Here’s Transportation Analytics, built by Diana Dorinson at the previous Website In a Weekend Workshop.

Transportation Analytics highlights the owners qualifications at her profession.

Pattern 2: Sales Site

A sales site drives a visitor towards a purchase. Basic information is of course available, but you want them to buy. If you are selling your own product (or someone else’s), this should be clear on your homepage. You can use a sales site to directly fulfill a product order (such as for an e-book) or to close a sale that might require some off-line activity (like shipping a printed book).

An effective example is DIY Themes. A clear headline describes their product, and is supported by additional content, including a video, that allows a potential prospect to be educated quickly. A candy-like button tells people to “See Plans and Pricing”.

DIY Themes landing page features text and video.

Another great example is Zirtual, Maren Kate’s virtual assistant brokerage. Notice how every element on the landing page supports the “Get Started ->” button.

Zirtual's calls to action "Get Started ->" buttons are plain and simple, highly effective.

Your sales site could be as simple as a landing page – and could even be added as a page to an informational site. You might spend more time working on a sales site as you hone your copy, images and video, or even your overall pitch.

Pattern 3: Blog-based site

The two patterns above provide a consistent set of information that doesn’t change very often. A blog, on the other hand, provides a fresh stream of information to visitors, who then engage through comments, social media, and email – with you and with each other. A blog might have different content on the homepage every time you visit, so it’s helpful to give a first-time visitor a clear starting point so they understand what it’s all about.

Blogs help your business establish credibility, or even help you gain direct revenue through advertising or affiliate marketing (if the blog *is* your business). If you’re making revenue through advertising, you need to focus on keeping your visitors on your site as long as possible, looking at as many pages as possible. So, you need to create or curate an ongoing experience.

Since you’re reading this on Website In a Weekend, you’re looking (and perhaps participating!) at a blog. You might have come here because you’re a regular reader, or because you found the answer to a question using a search engine. Take a a look at the stuff on the right-hand side of this page, and start exploring.

Now what?

Now that you’ve considered the patterns before you and you have your basic goals in mind, you can start looking at pretty WordPress themes and plugins that will help you with colors, graphics, layout and functionality.

Later, you’ll have to write a whole bunch of content, if you haven’t already.

Anca Mosoiu lives in Oakland, California, where she owns and operates a technology salon. Tech Liminal provides visitors with a unique experience: technology expertise delivered – in person – by nice people who make customers feel more in control of the online aspects of their businesses.

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Three common websites you can build in one weekend

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Getting from broke to bank online requires setting a few website goals, and these 7 critically essential points will help you get there.

Understanding your website goal or goals is so important, we make it one of the first exercises of our Website In A Weekend Workshop.

Setting goals is easy and hard. The easy part is the “what” and the hard part is the “how.”

For example, your what might be “Make money,” and your how might initially be “???”. Specifying your goals precisely will help get rid of those question pesky marks, and we have just the thing, the following list proposed by Drayton Bird:

1. What is my website’s purpose for the reader?

Write out your grand vision. This is where your passion should flow out, creating an image in your mind of such strength that you have a bottomless well of enthusiasm helping drive you forward.

2. What am I doing to get people to go to it?

Getting people to your website, as reader or customers, is called “building traffic.” There are many, many ways to build traffic, and you can build traffic organically as you create your website.

3. What am I doing to get people to stay on it for as long as possible?

The more valuable information, education or entertainment people find on your website, the more likely they are to read more, and if you have products, the more likely they are to purchase from you.

4. What am I doing to collect prospect’s names?

If you are creating a website for products and services, you will soon need to learn who your customers are, and establish communication with them. The most common way to do this is by using a mailing list. We’ll have more information on how to use mailing lists, and how to purchase the appropriate mailing list service (these services are inexpensive, it’s something you really don’t want to do yourself).

5. What am I doing to turn those names into money?

There are three ways to make money directly from a website:

1. Sell your own products and services.
2. Sell someone else’s products and services.
3. Sell advertisement.

Note the operative word here is “sell.” You can hard sell or soft sell, but… no sell means no money.

Turning names into money is a bit beyond our scope for your first 48 hours, but we’ll make sure you build this infrastructure into your website as we go.

6. What am I doing to measure what happens on my website?

You need a Google Analytics account. Get a Google account if you don’t already have one and sign up for Analytics. It’s easy and it’s free.

7. Is the copy in English or is it pretentious jargon?

(Drayton notes he spends a lot of time rewriting website copy; starting by asking people what they actually mean by some of the phrases they use; many [Drayton notes] find this quite taxing.)

Writing effective copy is critical. Even you have no interest in selling products or services, growing your readership requires effective written communication. There is a vast amount of material available on the web to help you learn to write. For most people, especially people interested in blogging, Copyblogger is a great place to start.

Once you have answers to these questions, consider setting up a Goals page on your website. Having your Goals page on your website is handy, you always know where to find it. And you can make it private if you like.

Let’s do it!

How to add your “Goals” page

1. Pages > Add New
2. Page title should be “Goals”
3. Copy the list above into your Goals page
4. In the Publish widget (up and right from your page editor), set the “Visibility” to “Password Protected.” Make sure to click “Ok” to save your changes.
5. Publish the post.

Next, log out of your website and visit the page. The URL pattern should be be “http://yourwebsitename.com/goals” where “yourwebsitename” is, of course, the name of your web site.

Now you have the goals for your website in an easy-to-find location, but only you can see them.

You may want to make your goals public, as I have: Goals for Website-In-A-Weekend. If so, skip the password-protection step above.

Make your Goals page now

It’s worth doing, whether you decide to password-protect or not. If you decide to password protect, you will be in good company.

Let’s have some reader participation. Write out your website goals. Are your goals public? Would you like to share? If “yes” to both, send me a link to your Goals page and I’ll add it to the following list:

1. BACKLINK 1: Josh Kohlbach more than rose to the challenge. He positively schools me on Code My Own Road Goals! Well played, Sir.
2. BACKLINK 2: Dave Thackeray’s rocking out his audio marketing goals for The Podcast Guy.
3. BACKLINK 3: Annabel Candy gives us 5 simple steps planning for success.

Let me know your preferred anchor text, and if you want, send the meta description as well. Links usually work better with contextual support.

First published on: Feb 8, 2009
Updated April 11, 2010
Updated May 9, 2011
Updated January 7, 2012

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7 Critically Essential Elements of Your Website Goals

(Reading time: 7 – 11 minutes)

This article on website hosting was the very first article published on Website In A Weekend. This is the fourth update, which features extensive revisions, including discussion about non-WordPress website hosting solutions.

Money? (Your fundamental question)

Before going any further, there is one question which needs an accurate answer: Are you planning-at any time-to use your website for making money?

If you are not interested in making money with your website, you have a lot of options and we’ll cover some of those presently. But let’s make sure we’re on the same page about this money thing.

3 methods for making money with websites

Making money with a website is simple in concept. Here’s the gist of it:

1. Sell your goods and services
2. Sell other people’s goods and services
3. Sell advertising

Often, people do well using a combination of two or three of these methods. This is important because choosing how your website is hosted often depends on what kind of business you plan to conduct. Specifically, do you want to be completely in charge of your own site, or do you want have your site maintained for you?

The difference between maintaining it yourself (self-hosted) versus having it maintained for you (hosted) is usually limitations based on the amount and kind of business you’re allowed to operated when your site is hosted for you.

Let’s take a closer look at the hosted and self-hosted models.

Hosted vs. Self-hosted

Finding a website hosting provider is the absolute first step for getting a web site. You have two choices:

1. Hosted website: you allow someone else or a company to administer all of the administrative details in return for giving up control of capability and being subject to the host’s business conditions. Typically, websites hosted for free are required to serve ads for the hosting company, and not allowed to conduct business. With some fee-based hosting services, you may be allowed completely free reign for business activity (local statutes permitting).
2. Self-hosted website: you have a high degree of freedom (limited mostly by statute) to use your hosting account for whatever purpose you choose. Most people start with what’s known as a shared hosting account, which is easy, fast and inexpensive, but will be outgrown as your website becomes more successful.

If you’re really serious about getting on the web, you’ve probably made the decision to use a self-hosted account. Since you’re here, you have also made the decision to use WordPress as your website technology.

Good choice.

Nearly all web site hosting providers now support WordPress, and most of these all have very easy-to-use installation scripts allowing to install your WordPress web site very quickly and easily.

As noted previously, shared hosting is a very good choice for getting started with WordPress, but it’s not your only choice. In fact, there are at least a half dozen popular hosting models, many of which are discussed in this very long article on WordPress hosting.

If you aren’t ready for self-hosting, and you aren’t sure you want to use WordPress, no worries. Just skip over this part to read about other useful website and blogging platforms.

There are many hosting services, including Siteground, GoDaddy, Dreamhost and Bluehost, but I like Bluehost well enough to give it a recommendation and to become a sales affiliate. Bluehost’s terms of service will not allow affiliates to provide any financial incentive, otherwise I would – personally – provide a money-back guarantee for your satisfaction. I feel Bluehost is that reputable. Since I can’t provide such guarantee, here’s both affiliate and non-affiliate links:

• Signup at Bluehost (Help support Website In A Weekend!)
• Signup at Bluehost (WIAW makes no commission).

Choose the link you feel most comfortable using.

You’re free to choose any other hosting service as well. If your choice of hosting services provides a cPanel administrative interface, that’s even better. You may even have a friend or relative who can provide free hosting. However, be aware that website hosting with friends should be done with care to preserve both your business and your friendship.

After you purchase hosting

Once you purchase hosting, you will get one or emails to:

1. Confirm your purchase.
2. Confirm your administrative username and password.
3. Provide details for FTP accounts and other necessary services.

Save all of these emails! Label or tag them so that you can find them in the future. Print them out if you must, and put them into a folder or a binder.

Ready?

Great! You’re done here.

Now let’s get started installing WordPress.

Other website and blogging platforms

While self- (or paid-)hosted WordPress power the vast majority of small business websites, there are many other alternatives, both free and paid. Here are a few of the more popular.

• WordPress.com: An excellent choice for many people who want the power of WordPress without the commitment of operating their own website. WordPress.com is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc., and it’s the same software running WordPress blogs and websites everywhere. Basic accounts for WordPress.com are free. If you would like to operate your business, a range of addon fees to provide a domain name, custom styling and like are available.

  If you’re a consultant, and business or engineering services are your focus, this may well be your best option.

• Typepad: If you want a low hassle, high powered blog, you might check into Typepad. While not as large as WordPress, Typepad holds its own with bloggers who want to concentrate on writing more than marketing. Entry level prices are competitive, and very good value considering your maintenance costs (i.e., your time spent maintaining) disappear.
• Blogger: One of the very first blogging applications, now owned and operated by Google. If you have a Google account, you can set up a Blogger blog very quickly. Blogger features posting by email, domain name mapping, Picasa integration for images and publication from Google Docs. If your blogging needs are not extensive, and your interest is mostly in hobby or perhaps technical blogging and not business or marketing, a Blogger blog may be all you need.

  Also, if you’re old school and haven’t checked out what Blogger has been up to lately, check out this article on design Blogger templates. You might be surprised. I was.

• Posterous: If you write fast, post frequently, and your purpose is exposure, Posterous is happy to take care of most of the fiddly details for running a blog-driven website for you. I use Posterous for small blogging articles and snippets, half-baked ideas, crazy notions, all sorts of writing that isn’t appropriate for the main Website In A Weekend blog (what you’re reading here and now). Check out Website In A Weekend on Posterous.

  Posterous also features posting by email, for both public and private posts, custom theming, and you can operate your own domain name. This last feature is popular with small Silicon Valley startups who want to run a blog, but don’t have time to operate a full-blown WordPress site. It’s easy for them to set up a subdomain for their company blog using Posterous.

• Tumblr: Do you take a lot of pictures? Make infographics? Create short yet rich, dense content? And you want it all done fast, free and easy? Tumblr may be the place for you. Actually, Tumblr isn’t exactly a “blogging” service. All content is treated more or less equally, in contrast to a blog’s emphasis on writing, with images, audio and video more as supporting elements. Perhaps even more interesting is Tumblr’s model for community and social interaction, which is similar to Twitter in the way: following another user’s Tumblr account results in that user’s feed integrating with yours. It’s very cool, and worth checking out in any case.

You may find one or more of these services useful as adjunct to your main WordPress powered site, for both SEO backlinking support and for reaching new user communities. Your mileage may vary!

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

As noted in the preface, this article has been revised to reflect the current state of hosting for small business websites.

I’d be delighted to hear more about your hosting experience, both hosted and self-hosted, in the comments below.

Note: Every time this article refreshes, I get comment spam from hosting companies and affiliate marketers attempting to poach my readers (that’s you!) to sell you sketchy hosting packages full of promises and empty of benefits. If this is you, do not poach my readers! I will ruthlessly delete your comment.

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Website Hosting for Your Benefit (not mine)

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon as I write here at Dos Palmas, Website In A Weekend’s headquarters. The weather warmed up a bit last few days, enough to get out and root around on the stairscape. Urban living precludes the Big Yard (“garden” for those across the pond), so there’s no turf. But there are stairs, and my stairs are covered with potted plants.

Given the rain, it’s time for a different type of gardening. Namely, digging around Website In A Weekend website to get a curriculum ready for the second Website In A Weekend seminar.

You didn’t know there was a first Website In A Weekend? That’s a story for another day.

Anyway, this means I’m intensively blogging (whatever that means) for the next couple of weeks. If you see me post on twitter twice a day instead of once a day, now you know why.

Repotting content

At the time I’m writing this article, there’s 479 published posts and over 150 published pages on this website. More than half have real technical content, most of which is still actionable.

It’s amazing so much of it is still relevant.

How to present all this stuff?

I mentioned the other day to Anca Mosoiu, my co-host in this venture, that I probably could speak for 16 hours straight on building and operating websites, extemporaneously, without any notes at all.

We decided that probably wasn’t a very good idea.

People can get that information themselves, for free, just look it up on the web.

Instead, it’s much more important to motivate people with shorter presentations telling relevant stories and providing opportunities for engagement and hands on interaction.

Which is a LOT harder for the hosts.

Hosts… that’s an interesting word. Why “host” and not “instructor” or “teacher” or “lecturer?”

We have chosen to be hosts because the nature of instruction has changed radically in the last 10 years.

We see our responsibility as being enablers, facilitators and encouragers rather than teachers or instructors.

There is no way, in one weekend, anyone can learn everything necessary for success online, with or without a website. However, we believe that in one weekend, anyone can learn the basic necessary skills for bootstrapping themselves.

More important, we believe that we can – in one weekend – change small business owners perception of website technology. Mastery is a process, that process can be learned, and we’re teaching it to our Weekenders. As a website owner, you will leave this weekend confident in your ability to handle critical website technology.

Enabling success

Enable means: “To supply with the means, knowledge, or opportunity; make able.”

Anca and I have the knowledge, in spades. We have the means.

And we’re giving our Weekenders the opportunity.

Facilitating success

Facilitate means: “To make easier; assist the progress of.”

Hands on, active help. We’re not standing at a podium broadcasting what you should do. Instead, we’ll be demonstrating how it’s done.

From setup, to configuration, to best practices for operations and maintenance, writing, promotion and marketing, we’re going to be right there, helping out.

Encouraging success

Running a business can be the most amazing experience ever, and it can be incredibly discouraging… both in the same day!

We’ll show you where to expect surprises. We’ll discuss what can go website-wrong, and how you should handle it.

Above all, we’ll show you that what you need to put into practice is not difficult.

Register for Website In A Weekend through Eventbrite.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Enabling. Facilitating. Encouraging: Website In A Weekend March 25-27, 2011

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

For me, Website in a Weekend has always been a killer resource for people getting into the whole “creating your own website” scene, giving them the step by step instructions needed to succeed.

It’s really a journey of exploring all this technology stuff, getting into some of that writing stuff, and trying to jumble it all together into a trifle of business and pleasure.

Do you remember back to when you were first starting out? Most of us were just feeble bloggers, standing out on a limb, getting our thoughts out into the world.

Remember how daunting setting up your own website hosting was? How you battled with WordPress day in and day out trying to get that theme to align just right?

The first time I did all that I found it daunting as well and I’m qualified programmer!

Getting you started with web design & creation

This week, I’ve launched a new website with a free 8 day eCourse aimed at those of us just about to start building their websites.

Teach Yourself Websites is a free, 8 day course delivered via email which gives you all the ingredients you need to create a professional looking and easy to manage website.

It’s based on an idea I had after (almost) too many questions from friends and family wanting to start blogs and websites – the answer was this little eCourse. Which not only helps them out, but also helps others as well.

Who Exactly Is The Course For?

The eCourse is geared toward the novice web designer looking to get into creating a website either for themselves or their small business.

But that’s not to say it’s all amateurs – the community forming around Teach Yourself Websites is growing and it’s turning into a real resource that attracts developers from all over.

The blog, written exclusively by practicing web designers and programmers, is a treasure trove of WordPress hacks, plugin and theme reviews and website showcases from Teach Yourself Websites alumni.

What Topics Are Covered In The eCourse?

Once enrolled you start receiving the course material the next day. The topics covered are:

• Website hosting
• Content management
• Creating a look for your website
• All the resources you need to create your site
• Where to find design inspiration
• A launch day checklist
• Blogging, keeping up to date and more!

As far as free courses go, this is a veritable minestrone of website creation materials.. (what’s with all the food references here?).

If you already possess the mystical web design skills yourself maybe you know a friend who is just at that critical stage of starting out? This website is definitely for them – give them the mixing spoon of destiny and send them along to TeachYourselfWebsites.com (after they get back from the races of course!).

Josh Kohlbach is a professional freelance programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia. Josh's blog Code My Own Road is packed with small business tips and technical tutorials for Do-It-Yourself entrepreneurs.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Teach Yourself Websites In 8 Days (A New Free eCourse)