Yes, you can build your website without a teenager!

In the many years I've been designing websites, the same problems crop up time and again.

1. No matter how lovely a website is, it is only as good as the last time it was updated. Most clients, no matter how determined, find updating their websites a challenge. I have designed websites for proprietary software such as Macromedia Contribute, which is supposed to make it easy. But it never is.

2. Web design is still a young discipline and evolving endlessly to keep up with rapid and neverending developments in technology.

The truth is, websites are obsolete from the moment they are created as browsers (that's Internet Explorer/Firefox/Safari etc) change on an almost weekly basis and organisations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are constantly setting new web standards, rules on usability and accessibility (which can have legal implications).

To keep a website up to date, a small website owner would have to employ a web designer full time. Or marry one (which my husband did).

A mind map summing up the themes of Web 2.0

So what is Web 2.0 and how is it going to solve the problem?

The best explanation I've seen is that Web 2.0 effectively has turned the internet into The Computer.

You don't need to shell out gazillion quid for Dreamweaver, Photoshop and all the other little bits of software, it's out there, online. Increased connection speeds and faster computers have made it possible for all the processing that used to be done (laboriously) at home, to happen online.

You can go online and upload an image, resize it, even morph it into something else. You can go online and create documents, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations. You can go online and build a website ... without knowing a single line of code.

And by building a website using a Web 2.0 service like Jimdo or Weebly, you won't need to keep asking a web designer to update the code because all the tinkering behind the scenes is already part of the package.

When I started learning code I told myself, "If you can have a baby you can build a website." And I did (have a baby AND learn to build websites).

By the same token, I tell other writers, "If you can write a novel, you can build a website."

Often, people find it difficult to get around the internet because though they work with computers, they might never have learned some basics that would make their lives easier. It might be something as simple as not knowing how to right-click a mouse or how to cut and paste.

But not knowing these simple basics is like swimming in the deep end without even learning to dog paddle.

I have decided that I no longer want to build obsolete websites. It would be far more sustainable to mentor website owners through the process of building their own websites. Mentoring will:

1. Plug the gaps in your basic computer skills and learn new ways of using the internet 
2. Help you think through what you want to achieve with your website and discover tools on the web which will help you achieve your goals
3. Find out what works and what is a complete waste of time. Where to find royalty free images and music. How to use them. How to exploit social networking. Should you blog? Should you podcast?
4. Learn how to make your website work harder: it is said it takes five visits to make a sale. How do you get people to return to your website five times?
   
5. Learn how the wider internet works and how you can make it work for you. What are the possibilities? Where do you start? What combination of old and new media will achieve your objectives?