Growing employee skills with in house workshops
A few days ago I gave a workshop titled “Introduction to the Web” to the whole creative team in the marketing department. I think it went quite well, I threw it together in an hour and just started talking not knowing what type of reactions to expect.
For some of the team who are print designers with no web background this was their first look at how the web functioned both technically and design wise. Stepping through an overview of how HTTP works and how a browser requests and constructs a web page did not seem too harsh. Basic HTML tags is when it started to get a little tense.
It was great to hear all their questions as I was talking because I could draw everything out. I have found that you can explain anything by drawing it on a whiteboard. Once we got through how elements are constructed and the DOM things went a little south. I started to explain the implementation of CSS which may have been too much for the hour and half workshop. But they got through it.
What I should have done was gone straight to the box model, squares were the theme of the talk really and the box model only expands on it.
In the end what really got them excited was talking about designing on a grid. Glad I saved it for last because the use of a grid doesn’t help anyone if they don’t know the behavior of HTML and CSS.
All in all it went very well, so well we are considering bi-weekly talks on various topics related to print and web to educate the entire creative staff on what we all do on a daily basis. Being part of a higher education institution we have a duty to educate even if we are not in a class room, many of our student assistants and technicians have been taught by our senior staff and have grown into full time positions. This was the first time we did cross pollination of skills and we will only benefit from it, hopefully we can bring in the larger marketing staff for future workshops.
Check out the slideshow below.
Download the Introduction to the Web slides (PDF 850k)
