Web Design Training Blog

I have been training people to make websites for well over 10 years. Well in fact the Internet in general and the WWW in particular had only really just got going when I became a web designer. Because I worked as a trainer and teacher for many years before the WWW was a day to day thing, it was natural for me to want to teach people how to make web sites.

Since then I have taught web design to many hundreds of people in all sorts of settings. I enjoy doing it.

I have taught people to make their first simple web page and I have coached company web site managers through the ins and outs of making and maintaining web sites and online shops.

I am still a jobbing web designer of course - having a portfolio of web sites to maintain and now this blog !

More and more my job is helping other businesses to get more out of the Internet - you could say I am more of a web consultant than a blog standard web designer.

This blog is somewhere to put my thoughts about those ten years of experience of teaching web design.

That might help others to do their training a tiny bit better; it might help people who are thinking about becoming web design trainers.

Let’s just see if we get any comments on here.

Do web designers make good trainers?

Generally no. But I was a trainer before the www was invented. I took my training experience and applied to the task of helping people to design web sites.

Training is about helping people to learn.  Training is different from teaching, though, of course, both activities share a lot in common.  In fact, some of what I now do is called “coaching”.  Coaching is rather like working with sports persons.  They are already good at what they do - running, jumping - and the task of the coach is to help them to develop their technique, to manage the preparation and planning for a big event (project) and to  evaluate their performance.

Coaching web designers (as I do it) involves looking at their skills and their knowledge and seeing where the strengths and weaknesses lie. Is the web designer a good all rounder or do they are deficiencies that can be worked on?

A coach will work with a web designer to help them review all aspects of their work. It might mean looking at how they work, what tools they use, the proficiency with with they use those tools and sometimes considering their “x factor”, what inpspires them, what holds them back or what motivates them.

more later

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Training web designers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.