Orthodox Biz Blog

The old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words" may be a cliche but in the case of technical training - it's absolutely true.

In today's environment, ministries and businesses expect all kinds of interactivity out of customers, parishioners, online contributors, employees, service providers, and just casual users. Blogs, Discussion Forums, retail sales sites, online communities, and various directories all expect users to fill out forms, key in data, and even upload pictures.

Here's the rub in all this interactivity - many people can't do it at all, and many more who can handle it at a low level don't take full advantage of the various features. We all try to make things as simple as possible, but the fact is that there is always a tension between making applications robust and making them easy to master.

Too simplistic means that power users don't get what they need. Too complicated, and you lose the majority of your market space.

Let's take a concrete example, shall we? The image below is the editor bar for the myBlog tool used at OCN and Orthodox Biz for blogging. Take a look at it:

Do you understand what the different buttons do? If so, then chances are you have worked with similar applications, or you are familiar with Microsoft Word. (The buttons on most editors are patterned after Word.)

But chances are you don't know what at least a few of those buttons are all about. And that is on what is really a pretty basic editor.

The image below shows a much more complicated editor that does a whole lot more things and is commonly used in a Joomla environment:

If you don't know how to use this tool, how are you going to learn?

A power user will experiment on test text and eventually figure it out. Or, he might surf over to the site of the developer and check out forums, or communicate with other users and get tips.

Many people, however, are afraid to engage in trial and error. They have a real fear of breaking something. They also often don't know how to research an application to get more information.

So many people will just skip using what they don't understand, and might even skip participating at all. If you've got an online ministry or a Web business that thrives on member participation, this is a real problem.

Well - what can you do to help? What I've found is that the most effective thing to offer is training.

But how can you remotely train someone on a technical task? How can you show them what you see, and let them work through the presentation at their own pace? Screen captures are one option, especially if combined into PowerPoint slides (for example).

But, a superior approach is to do training videos that allow users to actually see your PC screen as you peform various tasks.

Training and demonstration videos can be done easily using an application called Wink which I highly, highly recommend.

Wink is absolutely free, and runs on all Windows and most Linux systems. Wink allows you to take pictures and videos of what's happening on your PC desktop. That allows you to demonstrate technical things like adding a blog, and capture the steps as a series of video frames which can be played as a 'movie.'

You can then edit the 'movie' by eliminating frames, you can put text boxes into the frames, pause and start buttons to let users control the speed of the presentation, navigation forwards and backwards, and even audio if you choose so users can actually hear you describe what you are doing. The results are automatically rendered from Wink as an .swf file. This type of file is commonly referred to as a 'Flash' file, and is the most widely viewable multi-media file on the Internet.

Over 90% of Web users have the installed plug-in necessary to view an .swf file. All you do is upload the files produced by the Wink application to a directory on your server, and then post a link to the URL for users to follow. The videos play inside the user's browser.

To see what the finished product looks like, you can look at the training video on Orthodox Biz that teaches users how to create a blog entry.

If you like what Wink can do, why not download Wink here and give it a try for yourself? If you ever find yourself saying, "If only I could show them my computer screen, they'd understand!" then you probably need this application.

For Mac users, I'm not aware of a free package that does what this one does in the PC world. Full disclosure, I actually work mostly on a Mac. But I have a Dell laptop, and since Wink is such a good program, I just haven't spent a whole lot of time looking for one to use on the iMac.

If you are a Mac User, and have a program to recommend, please post it in the comments below to help others out. (Including me!)

Glen Chancy is CIO for corfun.com and publisher of Orthodox Biz. You can contact him here .