I never expected when I got into work this morning that I’d find myself explaining the principles and upshots of web-based content management to my 65 year-old father by the afternoon, but life sometimes throws strange curveballs.
This all arose because Dad and my aunt have a little papercraft and greeting card side hustle and he also has been spending some time with establishing an website for the business. Over the holiday, one of my aunt’s friends set up a shared hosting plan and WordPress install for her (which I’ll admit I’d been meaning to do for a year) and of course I was all over that – if there’s one thing I can do for them it’s help them move into a WordPress install. So I took a little time Christmas morning showing my dad around one of my sandbox sites, just so he had a preview of what he and my aunt would be working with.
Then this afternoon, I got an urgent “text for help” from Dad:
“I have downloaded WordPress and am trying to install it on my MacBook…”
I really didn’t have to read any further. I did a facepalm and then gave him a call.
But this is not an “old people can’t internet” story. His misunderstanding of what a CMS was, how it worked, and why they have made the 21st-century internet what it is is entirely understandable. It had just been a while since I’d really thought about it enough to explain it…
I started messing around with web design for the first time in 1995 or 1996 using a program called Arachnid. It was, honestly, only a very tiny step above raw HTML coding, and from what little I remember of it, it was probably more complicated. It was horribly pointless and unsuccessful and it wasn’t until 1997 that, using a program called AOLPress and a friend’s AOL webspace, I published my first personal site.
Doing web design as a job in college helped me stay on the leading edge of content and web design technologies, and by the end of 2003 my typical schtick was hand-coding PHP/mySQL sites and using CSS.
And all along the way, I know that Dad sort of lived vicariously through what I was doing, and was able to admire and understand how I did what I did, and that if he ever wanted to do it, it was going to be more than a bit of a learning curve.
Of course, right around the time I entered the post-college workforce in 2004, I stopped really doing web design actively, and fell back from the leading edge of things, even though I was aware of how things were developing. So when the big thrust toward Content Management Systems and Social Media that would truly democritize who could publish and share knowledge on the web by divorcing the means to deliver content from the technical knowledge behind it, I couldn’t provide Dad with the insight into it at the same level I had before.
Which is, of course, why I found myself on the other end of the phone with someone who (again, understandably) thought that WordPress was…well… something like Dreamweaver.
I can’t say this enough. The advent of CMSes like WordPress has been HUGE. And it is a HELL of a paradigm shift, especially for Someone Who Has Reaped the Benefits of the Cloud without even knowing it.
So rather than tell him to install Apache, PHP and mySQL on his MacBook, I just set him up a site in my Network and gave him a brief orientation, then sent him to learn experientially and come back to me with questions or plugins/themes he wanted to play with. Both of us learn best that way.