 So my name is Lauren obviously and I'm a librarian and I also am completely in love with WordPress Which is why I'm here. So thank you all everybody who's like contributed to making that happen And I'm going to talk today about teaching the public in the public library how to use WordPress to make their own websites So why the library right so my library's mission is really broad Basically you can fit anything in it. It's to contribute to the recreational cultural and educational needs of the people of Queens Which is everything so educational, you know WordPress works for that Libraries in Queens are everywhere if you are in Queens anywhere other than JFK you're in walking distance to a public library I work at the one in Jamaica and it's the central library. And so we have a great training room And it's a really just a good space to teach We're also everything's free. No one charges for anything. We're trusted in the community and We provide services for everybody and it's a just a great place to do that also Libraries are the old-school open source. We've been lending things out for free since 1732. Thank you, Ben and We haven't really stopped since then and so when I'm teaching something I'm usually looking for something that people can access at home for free And WordPress does that for them, which is really fantastic. So That's why WordPress so I could use there are so many different ways to build a website that are web-based That we could use to teach people how to make a website in the public library But we use WordPress because well, it's open source. It's free It has a community versus being locked into paid services and as a librarian I'm super uncomfortable, you know telling someone they should use a particular commercial service That doesn't really work for me and Telling someone that they have to use a service that they have to pay for also doesn't work for me because I work in a really economically diverse community Some people have money and a lot of people really don't and maybe they want to have a blog anyway Maybe they want to have a website and start a small business anyway But they don't have a lot of resources to do that WordPress fills that and it's really well So the most difficult part of doing this has been the technology setup Like hands down that has been the most complicated thing. So I've tried a couple different ways to do it The first the first time I tried a one-session workshop with wordpress.com It has sort of worked except that no one ever remembers their email password ever Ever remembers their email password like two times a day. I have to help somebody recover it saying And so like you can't get the confirmation email for wordpress.com because you can't remember your email Fastword and then that takes up a half an hour of the class just recovering everyone's password So that didn't work Then we used instant wordpress Which was good, but difficult to get the sites off as in difficult as in I haven't figured it out yet So those practice sites are still sitting on those flash drives. It was really great. I Also didn't have a budget for flash drives So it wasn't really sustainable who used the lost and found ones that have been left there for like a year cleared them out You know people if you leave your flash drive at the library for a year We're gonna assume that you don't need it anymore And then we did the thing that did work Which was I have a set of Mac books that we got from a grant a couple years ago where somebody said spend this money And I said I want Mac books and they gave me Mac books that it was magical And we installed a map stack on each of them to have a test environment for people to try it out and So there's a reason that I'm doing it this way specifically So I want to make sure that the people who are learning how to build these websites have enough of an understanding of how a website works Underneath that they can talk to tech support when it inevitably gets screwed up right and so Building the map stack and having them build it on the org side instead of just doing the comm besides the email portion of it Means that they have to learn the vocabulary and they have to have sort of an Understanding of how it works so that they can do that next time when they go to do it So we break the workshop down into three parts Each one's about two to three hours long depending on how much time I can get the room for The first workshop goes is set up and wordpress structure, and then we talk about servers How a server stack works what it is what the vocabulary and languages and This is where I lose people Which is actually fine? So a lot of times people will show up to the class thinking it's Microsoft Word And or thinking they can just Hop in and do it and they're not ready like they've just come off of intro to internet We just taught them what a browser is they're still figuring out the mouse and they want to do a website real bad But they're not quite there yet, and they need more other classes to prepare them for this And so we put the complicated scary stuff up front so that we can then have a conversation with them about What they need to do to get to the point where they are ready to do this part So in this class we up we do the setup the server structure, and then we also do How to do wireframes and how websites are laid out In class 2 we talk about how to add content the difference between pages and posts and The difference between plugins and widgets because nobody understands that either Everybody thinks they're the same thing Even though they're totally different and not related. It's fun How to find images and how to add them to the media library and manage that and then we talk about image size Which is also really important because they will put huge images in there, and then it will take forever to load In the third class we wrap up everything we did in the second one take a look at what we've got on our test sites And then we talk about accessibility security and SEO and a lot of the accessibility stuff We go through the tools that you can use to check we go through Talk about adding alt tags and what a meaningful alt tag would be Because a lot of times if you've never built a site before and you've never used an alt tag You have no idea what it is and these are almost always very very beginners and then for security would talk a lot about passwords and Making sure it's not the same that you don't use the admin as your admin name and all of that stuff Lots of stuff doesn't work So the very first time I did a five session or well, it was supposed to be six six session workshop where we were Having teenagers build WordPress sites for local small businesses One we had a giant blizzard right before the very first class And so I had to call from my house everybody who was on the registration list and be like don't drive You know don't come to the library and then The businesses didn't participate the way they were Supposed to so they didn't show up which makes it difficult to teach a group of teenagers how to talk to small businesses about what Their site should look like if the small business doesn't come And so we have a really fantastic laundromat site kind of hanging out just waiting for the laundromat to claim it You know And then instant WordPress didn't quite work out the way I wanted it to either because we couldn't move managed to move the Sites off it I did have one business who came in the beginning and then came at the end to get the site And we actually had to rebuild it on his hosting service because we couldn't get it to move over But even with all that we had a lot of really great results We've got two blogs that are set up and running that I'd know the people and still talk to Alexander's mom calm and big it the fitting style calm, which are really great One woman had been a web developer Before but hadn't worked with WordPress very much And she actually started getting job interviews because she could transfer her knowledge over and now She had the vocabulary to talk about WordPress So she got at least one job interview, which was awesome and Then one of the great things about it is that teaching multi-session workshops in a library People don't show up for the rest of them They come in for the first one and the second one and maybe they're like, yeah, it's free Why come back? but this one we managed to hold on to almost everybody and that was Really great We also got really fantastic survey results For everybody and the super fun laundromat website, which I'm still sort of hanging on to Basically, I think we need to think of libraries as a place where people can learn things like this We do a lot of basic digital literacy and teaching people how to use Microsoft Office and teaching them how to find job Like use that to find jobs in regular industry, but we don't always bring in the advanced things for adults We'll do coding for kids because it's trendy and that's what libraries, you know Do we do education and everybody's talking about that? And so we bring it in but we really do need to be reaching out to adults and teaching them career skills that they can use that are more advanced than just Microsoft Word and WordPress gave us a really great place to sort of fit that in without having to teach coding itself Which is really difficult to do with people who are just in that intermediate digital literacy stage like they've got Excel But getting decoding is hard so I Really hope that a lot of people will try this and we'll try to Bring these sorts of things into libraries because I think it can be a really big difference in people's experiences I'm good