When Expert provides a proposal for a new client’s new website, training is always factored in. It makes sense to be familiar with the workings of your website, especially if it’s you who is going to be updating it. New clients nearly always take up the training and pick up the rudiments quickly, and in the following weeks or months we sometimes receive the odd email or phone call seeking further assistance. Training notes are provided when the training is undertaken and there is help available in MoST’s help folders.

MoST is an easy to use software system and is largely intuitive. Training is offered to multiple staff members in an organisation; however, it’s usually only taken up by one or two people, and these are usually the ones who have been involved in the website project. Whilst one staff member is usually able to share what they have learned, it makes a lot of sense to train several people, as this provides continuity and back-up should that person be sick, on holiday or if they leave the organisation.

When new staff come on board it’s really useful to get them up to speed quickly with MoST if they are going to be using it to do their job. It’s hard enough learning a new job, but even more so if you aren’t familiar with the tools and software platform that is used.

Like anything, it’s not until you’ve been using something for a while that you become aware of what it can and can’t do. It’s the same for our own abilities. As the old saying goes, “we know what we know, we know what we don’t know, but we don’t know what we don’t know”. If you cast your mind back to when you learnt to drive a car, you’ll recall that you really mastered driving and developed your own driving technique once you’d passed your licence and started driving solo. Prior to this point, there’s a lack of experience, a lack of confidence and usually a lack of judgment to contend with. The same can be said for managing your own website with no prior learning or knowledge.

By providing one-on-one training, the participants can ask questions that are specific to their own site and situation. Expert has clients all over the world and we provide training to our overseas clients via electronic meeting platforms. Getting the scheduling to align across different time-zones is the trickiest part – one party is usually about to go to bed and the other is often just getting out of bed, so someone is always tired.

We find that clients benefit the most once they’ve had some time to ‘play’ with editing and updating their website in a live environment and it’s often in the second training session, usually some months later, that everything falls into place and where the true value is gained. Unfortunately, quite a few miss this second session, usually through other work pressure.

Some clients have neither the time nor the inclination to manage their website, so Expert steps in and does it for them for a small extra charge. On the other end of the scale, we occasionally have clients who just love playing with their site and they are really proficient and talented. It certainly shows in the end result.

Whatever your situation, preference or skill level, it’s in everyone’s best interest to have all MoST users feeling capable and comfortable managing their websites, so we encourage clients to talk to us about how we can get them up to speed, competent and confident.

To help you to manage the updating of your website, we also provide information on MoST updates through our ezine or by email, so keep an eye out for those coming through. MoST is an ever-evolving product and we like to help our MoST users to evolve with it.

Please contact me if you’d like to know more or to arrange your next training session.