Friday 31 January 2014

Do we need Website Production training courses to grow the roles?

For all my time building sites in house at companies I have had production staff to work with. They tend to come from all different backgrounds and often did not apply for that job. Production staff are sort of cs-junior frontend-data-marketing-writing-helpful types. These are people who learn how to process the data and images and work the website. They are not a one role person that does just content entry or advertising or sales. They are helpful to process or batch process and a little layout raw material into resource or finished work.

I was recently asked to freelance on a big site doing a  upper end version of this, setting up tools and reports and batching data into the writers and marketers but for the time and possibly the budget it did not fit. What they were finding hard is often people dont look for this as a role so were finding it hard to recruit.

I have been talking with my team and some friends about we find it difficult to find or train people to be able to block out sites and then train the client.  So we want a short course or cert that our clients could even do as a paid version. The subject would be Joomla/CMS Production Training.

What we would need:
Know how to use joomla 3
Know how to make menus
Know how to make module
Know how to make articles
Know how to make categories
Know how to build a page from a blank install with the parts
Know a base set of extensions
Know basic html needed for use in an article and what it might be used else where
Know the different use of html, css, js so they can ask issues intelligently
Make images the right size and file format

Plus level:
Can look at a design and have idea what plugins and modules they would need to make
Know how to research new extensions and suggest them
Be able to train the client on these things
Be able to offer first level support on these
Know when a problem is a bug or an error in the setup they can fix

Plus level variation if html skills:
Build some template parts from html they were given 

Task ideas:
Migrate a wordpress or static site to Joomla
Load data from a spreadsheet into joomla
Get images from any source and put in the site the right sizes
Add all the base menu + articles needed to the site
Add sample 10% content to the sections of the site so that layouts can work and client can see and do
Change a theme on a joomla site and update it
Update extensions 
Do backups
Maybe install joomla from scratch to make a new version


How does anyone feel about this sort of role and how you fill it or do the work?

As a php developer i just want to set the structure for the site and build the extra modules not fill it out so i can see if one thing works.