The post User Profiling and Usability Testing below, is also posted on http://eyc.simongurnsey.net/ as a sample post and warmup for participants in the workshops I ran for the eEngage Your Community Day (hence the eyc sub-domain) organised by Volunteering Canterbury. The day attracted people from from a range of NFP sector agencies who got together to work out how to enable more ‘e’ interactivity in their communities.
To give the workshop participants actual experience of creating and editing a WordPress post was tricky. My first thought was they could all create an account and then get a blog at WordPress.com, the problem being that only some of them would be able to access the confirmation email WordPress.com sends.
Next idea; I set up a site at http://eyc2010.wordpress.com then I created an Admin level user with an easy name and password. This would be the log in that the whole group would use to have their actual experience and exploration of WP. Once I’d done that I thought ‘actually this is a good example of the start up WP template, so I retained the WP.com site as this example.
Next step was to set up the eyc sub-domain on simongurnsey.net and install WordPress using Dreamhost’s one click install. Its very quick using one click install as I don’t have to download wordpress and FTP it to the site. I’ve done a few installs like this now, so I am pretty quick deleting the existing content: posts pages and links and installing a few of of my favourite plugins, like Magic Contact.
I then set up my universal user account with no real way of testing whether WP would handle up to 20 users all logged in and posting at the same time.. Ulp.
The first workshop went ahead with its registered 6 people and the leader of the abandoned Fun with Wordle workshop, which no-one turned up to. After getting the data-projector going and finding out which computer ran it (not the on I had set-up already, un-fortunately), I asked all the participants to log in to their computers. I then told them all to wheel their chairs up the front and talk about who they were wanting to communicate to and and what. This was the most critical part of the workshop to me, actually getting across that its the ‘message not the media’. Imaging your audience is vital because otherwise the website becomes about you and not about them and what you can do for them.
It comes down to something as basic which page is the default front page. If you are truly thinking about your site visitors I contend that an up-to-date blog post is the first thing they see. Have an static page with ‘Abouts’ close by with all that stuff about your organisation, have Contact page somewhere obvious, but if you really want to have a relationship with your website visitors, information has to be fresh, personal and answering the questions, they have come to your website with.
- Who are you?
- Can you solve my problems?
- What are you thinking, doing right now?
- Can I develop a relationship with you?
- ….?
I was delighted when in this workshop, and the one in the afternoon (with 20 people), most of the participants were able to post. They got as far as the create-a-post page, then all of their transferable skills kicked in.’OK this looks like wordprocessor, I’ll write something!’ B = bold, I = Italics “So, now I can change the way the text looks”. “What happens if I click this button… great that lets me put up an image”. There was a sense of that something really tangible had come of the workshop – actually its still there.
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