CMS training

What CMS training is

CMS training is a practical session, usually two hours, held inside your own website rather than a demonstration site, teaching the specific people who will use it how to do the small number of jobs they are actually going to do. It is recorded as it happens, and it produces a written quick-reference afterwards. The system is whatever you run: WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace or something a developer built for you.

It is not editorial training. Nothing in it is about what to write, how long a page should be or whether the argument holds; that is writer coaching and it is a different job. This is entirely mechanical. Which button, in which order, what it does, and what to do when it goes wrong.

Who this is for

A business where one or two people have website access and use it rarely enough to dread it. The symptoms are familiar. Nobody touches the site without the owner present. A price on a page has been wrong for five months because changing it once broke the layout. Somebody pasted a paragraph from a word processor and the font on that page has been different ever since. Staff turn over and the login is handed on with no explanation attached.

You do not need this if nobody in the building wants to learn, and that is a legitimate position. Training somebody who resents it produces a person who still will not touch the site. In that case buy CMS content entry instead and send me the finished text; it costs less than an afternoon of training that gets used twice. You also do not need it if the site is being replaced in the next few months — wait, and learn the new one.

What gets taught

Four jobs, because four is what people retain and four is what they actually do between now and next year.

• Editing text on a page that already exists. Finding the page, editing in place, previewing, saving, and the difference between a draft and a live change. Including how to paste text without carrying the formatting in with it, which is the commonest way a small business site gets visually broken.
• Adding a new post or page. The template to start from, the headings, the categories, and where the page has to be linked from so a visitor can reach it. A page nobody links to is not published; it is just stored.
• Images. Sizing before upload rather than after, naming the file something a human would recognise, and writing the alt text. Oversized images are the usual reason a page loads slowly, and the fix happens before the upload, not in the software.
• Publishing and scheduling. Going live now, going live on Tuesday morning, unpublishing, and the check on a phone before any of it. That check becomes part of the routine, which is the quality pass done properly.

Two more things are covered briefly because they prevent the worst calls: where the backup is and who to ring, and which parts of the interface nobody on staff should touch.

What you get

The recording. The session itself, captured on screen with the audio, split into the four jobs so a person hired next spring can watch the eleven minutes about images rather than the whole thing. It is your file, kept wherever you keep such things.

The quick reference. Two sides of paper, with screenshots from your site, one numbered sequence per job. It is written after the session so it uses the names your people used, not the names in the manual.

The do-not-touch list. One short page naming the settings, plugins and menus that should be left alone, and who to contact when something on that list needs changing.

A fortnight of questions. For two weeks afterwards, short questions answered by email or a five-minute call, at no extra cost, because the questions that matter only arrive once somebody tries it alone.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A family-run flooring shop has a Shopify site with about ninety products and a small blog nobody has updated in two years. Two staff have logins. Neither has used one since the site was built, and when the spring promotion needed a banner changed, the shop paid a developer for two hours of work that took eleven minutes.

The session runs on their live site on a quiet Tuesday morning. Both staff change the text on three product pages, publish a post about underlay, and schedule a second for the following week. The image section takes longest, because the photographs coming off the shop camera are far larger than the site needs and nobody knew that mattered. The do-not-touch list ends up with six items, five of them theme settings. Six weeks later the shop is publishing a post a fortnight, has stopped calling the developer for text changes, and the second staff member has watched the images section twice.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What system you run, who will be in the session, and what they have already tried and abandoned. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before a date is held, including the recording and the reference sheet.
3. Access first. I need a login of my own a few days beforehand, so the session is built around your actual pages and your actual theme rather than a generic version of the software.
4. The session. Two hours, on video or in person, no more than four people, everyone with their own screen and doing the work themselves rather than watching me do it.
5. Afterwards. Recording and written reference within three working days, then a fortnight of questions.

What it costs

Quoted after the first call as one fixed figure, because it depends on the system, the number of people and whether it is in person. It does not sit in any of the published monthly bands; the pricing page shows the four standard ways of working so you can see the shape of them beside this. The figure is agreed in writing before the date is booked, and the recording and reference sheet are included rather than charged for separately.

What happens next

Most businesses that do this start publishing their own posts, and the next thing they want is a consistent format for them so every post is built the same way. Some find the writing, rather than the software, was the real obstacle, and move to coaching for the person doing it. Others keep the training for routine changes and hand the awkward ones to someone who does them as they arise. None of that follows automatically. The training is a complete job, and knowing the four things is often all a business ever needs from its website software.