Training

On the home page we said we want show how every area of knowledge and activity relates to God. Clearly this it too big a task for us to do on our own. That is why we place a high value on training. If we are working on a web site we often invite an apprentice to work with us. He or she will sit down with our developer and they work on alternate pages each one watching what the other is doing. This adds little time to the development process but it means that a person leaves knowing how to edit and upload web pages using freely avaliable software.

Editing a web page is a fairly simple process but, many find the idea very intimidating. By training Christians how to do these tasks for themselves we enable them to create their own sites which show how God relates to their area of expertise or interest. On the web their are information producers and information consumers our aim is to shift the balance so that Christians become producers rather than consumers.

Examples

After completing The Lighthouse Bus web site I was able to train Tim (the man responsible for hiring out the bus) how to update the web site. He was convinced he would not be able to grasp it because he is not a programmer. However within the space of an hour he had learnt how to update each page using only a text editor and FTP (the program used to upload web pages). He was amazed how simple it was and set to work adapting the content (I've not had any calls asking for help since). These skills are transferable so they are of great value.

Tom Morrow is one of the coordinators for the Edinburgh Prayer Watch he also designed their web site. He spent a day with us working on a new site we were making to see how we did it. Afterwards he was able to completely redo the code for his site so that it is now much easier to update.