Thread

So I’m new to ExpressionEngine, about halfway through the project.

The client has asked for a Client Guide, something they can provide to administrative assistants to learn how to add/edit weblog posts, etc. Does it exist?

Thanks.

Not that I’m aware of and to a certain degree, every site is set up slightly different with custom field groups, categories, etc. that a general guide probably isn’t the most effective. I usually take some screen grabs and create a quick little Indesign guide and ship it off as a PDF.

A couple Ideas I use:

I create my own tutorials with screenshots so that I don’t explain things to every client where things are the same, such as cp, editing, uploading/resizing images etc, then direct them to the tutorials.
Recently I find adding more of them as clients ask for certain things, as it’s almost as easy to make a tutorial as writing it all into an email, then you only do it once.
Everyone has customizations, but doing the above has been very helpful.

Second is to make a template with “your” selected links to the EE docs for various functions, with a short explanation below each link, and provide a link in quicklinks to that template.

One thing we do for some clients is do a screencast video of editing the site and do a voiceover in Garageband and tie them together. We post the video up on the site for them to see and they can have “training” whenever they want. It takes as long as one training session, yet saves us from having to retrain clients over and over again. There are tons of software solutions that can take screencasts, both pc and mac, and are pretty easy to use.

Thanks for the responses, and they all sound great.

Does anyone have an example posted somewhere?

Hey Montgomery,

I have an online version of a guide at http://www.mayweek.ab.ca/emma, about 90% done. Feel free to copy any text or images you find useful (same goes for anyone reading this)—just copy images etc to your own server please.

This was done before the Wiki module came out—I intend to re-do this in the Wiki module (since the org finally bought the paid version), but I haven’t had a chance to re-visit it in about a year or so.

R o B