[wp-docs] Overwhelming?

[Sheryl Coe - Reportica]

I am working on that now. The audience for what you are talking about is 
Users as differentiated from Webmasters. I love the codex, I love the style, 
and the content is exactly what I need, it's top notich, I appreciate it so 
much. 

But I'd never be able to send my clients there. They will never go beyond 
the user interface they are presented with. They don't want to go to other 
web sites or theme web sites, they don't want to understand more than what 
they need to do on that page. 

So I'm writing up exactly that, two pages that start with 1) changing your 
password to something easier to remember... really basic stuff. 

Essentially the people who will come to codex will be the support people, 
not their users. And in fact you probably want that.

(I'm new here, but you probably don't want webmasters installing WordPress, 
charging for it, and sending their clients with their very basic. "What is 
my password?" questions to the free forums. Many people actually do not 
understand that the people that they pay to host/install are not paying the 
people running the forum. I go out of my way to mention that to each client. 
I can provide you with the write-up I hand out on that.)

Also the dashboard is very confusing to some of these users. Rather than 
turn that dashboard to my own site, perhaps we could offer a user-level 
'channel' that the installer could set by default one way or the other. 
(Users could change that.) Some examples of user-level articles would be 
"How do I keep my links fresh?" 

So if you set up a
I-can't-codex.wordpress.org<http://t-codex.wordpress.org>(that's a
joke) with that attitude of 'we support the support people.' that
might work. A dedicated section to that. "Resources for Supporting WordPress 
End-Users."

And on every page, put "For more information, contact the person who is 
responsible for supporting your local installation of WordPress." And leave 
space for them to customize it. I have lots of really really basic stuff you 
could use in that way.

Am I being silly, or unfriendly to end users you may welcome?

By the way, has anyone considered:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL
a GNU free documentation license for all this.

A PDF is OK as an alternate format. 

The questions people have are so basic... My number one problem is that 
people get upset when they get a request to approve spam for moderation, 
they don't realize it's not already viewed by their visitors. So I'll need 
to edit that notification text.

Sheryl

On 4/25/05, Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net> wrote:
> 
> I started at the WordPress Lessons page:
> http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons
> which is chock-full of information. I hadn't read "First Steps with
> WordPress" in a while, so I clicked there:
> http://codex.wordpress.org/First_Steps_With_WordPress
> also chock-full of information. Reading all of these two pages (which I
> didn't do) would take me a fair amount of time.
> 
> >From First Steps, I clicked on "how all of this works", which takes me 
> to:
> http://codex.wordpress.org/Working_with_WordPress
> 
> I've been using WordPress for about a year now, and feel fully
> comfortable with it. But I feel overwhelmed trying to follow the
> documentation. I've no idea what to suggest as a starting point for my
> mom, a fledgling WordPress user and a person entirely too busy to read
> all of this stuff.
> 
> Don't get me wrong: it's _fantastic_ that we have such a wealth of
> information. I wonder, though, if we can find a slightly more linear
> presentation method so as not to inundate the fledgling bloggers with
> too many links to too much information?
> Maybe we could tease out some of the information from Codex into a (PDF?
> HTML?) "WordPress Guidebook", which users could read offline (or print).
> 
> _Huge kudos_ to Carthik, Lorelle, and all the codex contributors. I am
> simply amazed at the quality and quantity of the information.
> 
> --
> skippy at skippy.net | http://skippy.net/
> 
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu <http://pgp.mit.edu> --recv-keys 9CFA4B35
> 506C F8BB 17AE 8A05 0B49 3544 476A 7DEC 9CFA 4B35
> _______________________________________________
> wp-docs mailing list
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> 



-- 

Sheryl Coe
web at reportica.net

Reportica
www.Reportica.net <http://www.Reportica.net>
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