[A live, in-person class on Orcas Island]

If you’re like most people, working on your website is intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Anyone can learn to maintain their own website.

It doesn’t matter whether your website is hand-coded, built in Dreamweaver, iWeb, Macwebsitebuilder, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or some other system you can’t pronounce. There are always going to be little changes you need to make, and these all become MUCH easier when you know a few foundational skills.

Let’s compare maintaining your website to maintaining your house. You might not want to know how to move walls around, or even how to fix your oven. But you should be able to…

Hang pictures and curtains (image uploading, formatting options)

Paint the walls (change colors)

Rearrange the furniture (adjust padding, margins, typefaces, etc)

Wash the dishes (keep things up to date)

You don’t need to know structural engineering, home building, etc. You don’t need to …

And unless you want to get into designing sites yourself, what you really need to know is a subset of HTML and CSS. A few powerful techniques can get you out of a lot of sticky situations, and you can leave the rest to the experts.

In this course we’ll take a practical hands-on approach, building from the true basics. Everything will be based on real tasks (on fake websites), so you’ll learn by doing.

We’ll cover topics like changing text, adding formatting, changing pictures, uploading files, adding forms (like e-newsletter signup forms), etc. And we’ll dive into certain advanced areas, such as using padding and margins to make things line up the way you want them (because this can often be the difference between an attractive website and one that’s distracting and hard to read).

We’ll also talk a lot about the mistakes you can make, and how to turn them into part of your learning process instead of letting them terrify you.

By the end you’ll have a good idea of what you can fix and what you shouldn’t touch. Just like knowing the difference between moving a vase on your kitchen counter and moving the kitchen counter. Or between moving your toaster oven and moving your real oven.

The class meets for six weeks on Wednesdays, April 14 to May 19, from 9am to 10am at the Funhouse. It’s $100, or just $75 if you’re a Funhouse member. To sign up email krista@thefunhouse.org or go to http://www.thefunhouse.org/current-classes and click on “register in advance” to fill out the registration form.

A laptop is helpful but not required.

Call me at 298-2869 if you have questions.

Update: June 2011. Check out my free guide to building your own mobile friendly page for your small business site.

You can’t ignore it any longer.

The mobile internet is here. People are using their mobile phones to visit sites on the internet. Mobile browsers are hitting the mainstream.

How many people are browsing with mobile browsers?

Take your head out of the sand

Try 50 Million of them. And the number is growing every month.

Which means that people are definitely visiting your site from their mobile phones, with mobile browsers.

Here’s the question you need to ask yourself:

What does a person using a mobile browser they see when they call up your website?

(Hint: It’s probably not good.)

Now, I could show you pictures all day about how mediocre other people’s sites are when viewed on mobile browsers, but the only site you really care about is your own. That’s natural.

So let’s find out what your site looks like.

First, though, you’ll need to understand that this exercise is not going to give you a 100% accurate result. With so many different phones running so many different operating systems and mobile browsers, the best you can hope for is an approximation.

But an approximation can be useful. For example, which of these two versions of Wikipedia would hold your interest?

Wikipedia for desktop

Wikipedia for mobile browser

The first image is what most websites look like on mobile. You can use the site, but not well.

The second image shows a mobile optimized site. You can read the text! Which would you rather have?

Here’s how to check out your own site:

Visit http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/ (but don’t click just yet; there are a few things I want to explain)

This site shows you a virtual cell phone running the Opera Mini mobile browser. This mobile browser isn’t on every smartphone, but it’s pretty representative. If your site looks great on Opera Mini, it’ll probably look great on other mobile browsers. If it doesn’t, it probably won’t.

The best thing about this demo site is that you don’t have to download anything. If you do an Internet search you’ll find many different mobile browser emulators available, but most of them require a download. Many are geared toward professional developers, and require not only that you download software, but also that you know how to extract, configure, and run things from the command line. Not worth the trouble!

Here’s how to use the Opera site:

1. Call up the site. If the site doesn’t display a virtual cell phone screen, try a different browser. (Firefox works.)

2. Click the “accept” button. (This step took me a while to figure out. Probably I should have read the instructions!)

3. Enter your URL in the mobile browser:

Enter your URL

4. Look at the results.

5. Cringe.

6. Whimper. (Optional)

If your site looks like this one, that’s totally typical:

Typical results for mobile browsers

The good news is, we can fix this.

As I warned above, this image of your site is not 100% accurate, but it will give you a good idea.

Let’s contrast this with a site that has been (minimally) designed for mobile. This is just a test site, FYI, not a real live version.

Test site designed for mobile

Notice any difference?

Other emulators:

If you’re running on Mac, there’s a decent application that’s worth downloading to see how your site looks on an iPhone. It’s called iPhoney, and you can get it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/iphonesimulator/. It’s interesting, but not perfect.

On Windows, you can download any number of simulators from Microsoft and manufacturers like Nokia.

But you shouldn’t waste your time. The simulator above gives you a good enough idea of what people see.

Next steps:

If you’re running a blog in WordPress, there are several plugins to “mobilize” your site. Take a look at http://ielectrify.com/design/wordpress-mobile/ for a rundown on the different options.

If you’re a regular small business owner with a regular website, check out my free guide to building your own mobile friendly page for your small business site

I have quite a bit more to say about mobile-friendly websites for small businesses. If you want to be sure to stay in the loop, sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar.

(If you’re like me you’re fully confident right now that you’ll remember to check back for the next installment in a few days, but you’re a busy person and it’s probably going to slip your mind. So do yourself a favor and sign up. It’s painless and there’ll be tons of value over the long term. Plus you get my free report on fixing up your website.)

You can also:

1. Tell your friends about this post.
2. Share it on social networks (tweet button works great, so does Facebook share, and more buttons are below)
3. Ask questions in the comments.

(Photo credit for head in sand man: jvh33 via Flikr)

A quick guide for small and micro-businesses.

Hiring a web designer is a pretty daunting process.You don’t really understand the technology, and you want something that looks good.

But there’s only one factor that really counts:

Are you going to be able to maintain the site yourself once the designer is done with it?

I’m not talking about making major changes. But unless your business is one of those that never changes, you’re going to need to make small modification over time.

Don't hire a web designer to build you something like this

Right?

As someone who works with a lot of very small businesses, I see too many people who’ve sunk thousands of dollars into complicated (and sometimes strikingly beautiful) websites that they simply can’t maintain on their own.

This is wrong.

So by all means find someone who can create a beautiful site for you. But it’s more important to find someone who will build you the site in an easy-to-use framework that you can manage yourself.

I’m a big fan of WordPress. Once everything is set up properly, the site owners don’t have to get involved in the nitty gritty of the code. But they’re free to keep updating the site as they see fit.

As soon as you have a tool that’s easy to use, you’ll use it more. And that translates into a stronger web presence, more traffic, and more committed fans.

Here are two sites you can go look at if you want to see what I mean. The first is the Salmonberry School. The teacher, Paul, didn’t even know how to properly code a hyperlink until this morning, but he’s been competently blogging about school events for several months now.

The other is the Funhouse on Orcas Island. These folks switched from a complicated and hard to maintain site that had been built in an old version of Adobe Pagemill (or something like that). Each update to the site involved emailing changes to someone who did the edits in between his other work. Now it runs on WordPress. The Funhouse staff can make all the changes themselves. (And they don’t even have to come running back to me for refresher courses. It’s that easy to use.)

By the way, both sites are running on the Thesis Theme for WordPress, which I like because it’s easy to customize (for someone who knows code) and even easier to use.

Conclusion:

If you’re looking for a designer, find someone who will build your site in a tool that will be easy for you to maintain, without forcing you to learn HTML.

It’s important to have an attractive site, but not at the expense of what I call “internal usability.”

Questions? Feedback? I’d love to hear it in the comments section.