The goal: Provide students with experience gathering requirements for a software project.

Context: Each lab section consisted of approximately 15 first year software engineering students.

Premise: Have the students solicit requirements from two different people in a software company: the CEO and a project manager.  This gives them an opportunity to practice facilitating meetings with different levels of management, and get a feel for the different types of requirements that come from different stakeholders.

Preparation: As the instructor, you need to create a list of requirements for all of the people that are to be interviewed (in this case, a set for the CEO, and a set for the project manager).  These requirements should be different to emphasize the differences in the types of requirements that various stakeholders will provide.  The more time you take to prepare these lists, the better understanding you’ll have of the software you want to create is, and the more the students will benefit from the exercise.  Make the requirements as realistic as possible, and go in with a definitive plan.

Process: The students were divided into two groups (7, and 8 people).  Both groups were given an overview of an imaginary high-tech company, Gadgetron, that sells gadgets in stores across North America.  The overview included the following information:

• company size (in number of employees and revenue)
• current company locations (cities with stores)
• demographics of current clientele (sex, age)
• overview of the number of products sold, best selling items, etc.
• the desire to expand to international markets was emphasized
• the desire to create a web presence to expand their reach

Following the overview, Group 1 went into the hall to come up with a team name, and prepare for an interview with the CEO of Gadgetron.  Group 2 stayed in the classroom and had 5 minutes to prepare for their interview with the CEO.  After preparation, I acted as the CEO of Gadgetron, expressing my vision and giving high-level requirements reflecting my desires from a management perspective.  These requirements were more focused on timelines, monetary resources, high-level technical requirements, marketing desires, etc.  The students needed to realize that what I wanted was not in line with the time/money resources I’d allocated, and make sure that they identified this, and keep the requirements within a reasonable scope (ie/ don’t make the iPhone/Blackberry apps up front, focus on creating a website).

After Group 2 interviewed the CEO, they went into the hall to prepare for their interview with the project manager and Group 1 came in and interviewed the CEO.  The project manager is the subject level expert, and had far more concrete details on what was to be developed: the scope of the website, what was to be shown on the interface and where, the differences between the registered users and guests, the desire to see reports (and what to show to different levels of management), the .  A lot of “nice-to-have’s” were introduced, and the students were required to determine what were the absolute requirements, and which requirements could be finished after the initial site was created.

Finally, Group 2 came back in and had their interview with the project manager while Group 1 went into the hall and discussed what they learned.  After all the interviews were finished, both groups came back in and gave feedback on what they learned.  They all were very excited to have completed this activity, and realized that requirements gathering is not as trivial as they had originally thought.  It also provided me with an opportunity to give them feedback on things that they did very well (such asking follow-up questions to things that I said, showing that they were actively listening and engaging their client), and suggestions on how to avoid some pitfalls that they encountered (i.e. asking the wrong questions to the wrong people).  All in all, this was a very successful exercise that promoted collaboration, individual thought, and integrated learning strategies.

The Rise and Fall of MySpace

According to the Alexa rankings, Facebook is the 2nd most visited site on the net (and closing in on Google for #1).  MySpace?  25th, and falling.  This is quite a shift from a few years ago when MySpace was the largest social network on the planet.

MySpace was bought by Fox News Corp in 2005 while still on the rise.  Maybe this was their downfall, as Rupert Murdoch clearly doesn’t understand how people use the Internet.  But I don’t think that Rup can be held solely responsible for this one.  So then, the question remains: why did MySpace lose the popularity contest?  There are a whole slew of reasons which I won’t attempt to elaborate on here:  Perhaps it was bad management.  Maybe it was their lack of ability to decide what they really are: a dating site?  a social portal?  a music site?  a band swapping place? who knows.  Maybe it was their appeal to the blue-collar internet crowd which pushed the advertising dollars toward the more affluent Facebook.

I’m not interested in any of those reasons.  I’m interested in the one reason that really stands out to me:  a complete and utter disregard of usability.  One of the biggest downfalls of MySpace is that the majority of people’s pages look completely unprofessional. Going to a MySpace page makes me feel like I’ve hopped into a time machine and landed back in the 90′s again. The onslaught of automatically playing music, animated gifs, and whacky fonts makes my head spin.

To be fair to MySpace, it isn’t that their website it totally unusable.  Their major problem is that they have allowed people to create and customize their own pages (based on templates MySpace provides), and unfortunately, a lot of people do not know the slightest thing about usability.  This has resulted in a barrage of unusable personal pages (and what is a social networking site if it’s not build around the user’s page?).  Here are a few of the common usability problems that I regularly see on MySpace profiles:

Misaligned content

I honestly don’t know what the MySpace designers were thinking.  One of the fastest and most efficient ways to make people say “unprofessional” is to have content boxes that aren’t aligned properly.  It is possible to align your content boxes, but it takes a lot of effort. Some of the boxes are wider than others, some longer… it’s just a mess.  This makes for a very unprofessional look, and is visually unappealing.

Badly chosen fonts

I’m not sure why, but for some reason, many people in the world are attracted to using gaudy, unreadable fonts on their MySpace pages.  It’s strange, because I don’t know many people that like to read these types of fonts — so why so many people think that using them in their own profiles is a good idea is beyond my comprehension.  Perhaps it’s a way of filling the need to feel unique; but there are many other more effective ways to do this.

Horrid colour schemes

People, seriously.  Here’s a free public service announcement:  the human eye is not built to read neon text on a yellow background.  Or blue on blue.  Or black on brown.  Or… you get the point.

Ridiculous Page Backgrounds

As a usability practitioner, I usually try and avoid the word “ridiculous” as a descriptor. But sometimes, you just need to say it like it is.  I was just on a MySpace page with a bright red background that turned out on closer inspection to be the Chinese flag, with cartoon pictures of Che Guevara, Einstein, and Chairman Yao weaing party hats and giving peace signs.  And it was tiled.

‘Comments’ pages that scroll forever

Again, MySpace, what are you thinking?  Do any other (successful) sites do this?  No.  Is there a reason for that?  Yes.  It is superbly annoying:  first of all, I’m probably not going to read a hundred comments.  But more importantly, it makes the page load far more slowly than it needs to.  Which leads me to the fact that…

It’s sloooooooow

Having streaming content on a page is going to make the page load slowly.  In fact, according to Alexa, 83% of sites load faster than MySpace.com.  Yet, for some reason, people continue to overload their pages with songs that start streaming automatically, pictures, silly backgrounds, infinite comments, videos, … and the list goes on.

And so, the Crown is Gone

The real issue here, is that MySpace has done nothing to mitigate these issues.  I understand that they have gone the route of personalization.  Is this the way of a successful social networking site?  Facebook, a the more successful successor, does not allow personalization through these self-destructive means.  Personalization takes on other forms: content, widgets, photo galleries, status updates, the Wall, etc etc.  MySpace has had it’s day in the sun, and we have all learned from their experience.  User experience matters.

It’s not that MySpace is dead.  In fact, it’s still very much alive.  But it’s dwindling, and it’s quickly becoming the “slums” of social networking sites.  Sorry MySpace, but it appears that the fat lady has sung (on the up and up, she probably has a MySpace page).  Guess you should have done some more user testing.

Overview of Heuristic Evaluation

What is heuristic evaluation? Heuristic evaluation is a quick and dirty method of identifying problems in a user interface (ie/ a website, or a software application).  The method was first published in 1990 by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich.  They had distilled their experiences with hundreds of software interfaces into a set of 10 usability principles that the most usable interfaces adhered to.  This list of “heuristics” is what is most commonly used today (for better or worse) when performing heuristic evaluations of websites and software.

“How do I perform a heuristic evaluation?”

The first thing that you need to know about performing a heuristic evaluation is this: it’s easy and you can do it. Don’t get overwhelmed by the unknown.  By the end of this article (in 5 minutes) you will know enough to do a heuristic evaluation.

Traditional heuristic evaluation involves having a few people independently examine how well a user interface adheres to a set of usability heuristics.  The evaluation is usually done in one of two ways:

1. Task-based: Each user is given a set of tasks that they are to complete using the interface.  They are armed with the list of heuristics to evaluate the interface against, and as they perform the tasks they make a list of the violations they encounter.
2. Element-based: Each user is asked to go through the interface a few times.  After they are familiar with the interface, they are asked to evaluate the different elements that they interact with against the set of heuristics, noting any problems they have had.

I have found the task-based heuristic evaluation to be very effective, though the information gained from each type of evaluation is slightly different.  Task-based HE tends to reveal more issues related to the interactions required while performing the specific tasks.  For this reason, it’s important to carefully select which tasks you give to the evaluators, which depends on your goals.  Element-based HE tends to reveal more aesthetic problems, and problems with navigation.  Since people don’t have specific tasks they are attempting to complete, they tend to focus more on the things they notice when “surfing” around a website.

Regardless of which method you choose, the results of the individual evaluators must still be aggregated.  Each evaluator will give you their findings, at which point you must group the similar problems and remove the duplicates.  Make sure that you have a clear understanding of each of the problems by asking the evaluators questions to clear up any ambiguity or misunderstanding.  At the end of the exercise, you end up with a list of unique problems with the interface.

It’s important to ask your evaluators to be as specific as possible when doing the evaluation.  Comments like “I don’t like this” are not valuable.  Encourage them to link the issues they find to the heuristics.  This ensures that they will separate the issues instead of grouping them into one mega-issue, and makes it easier to track what issues have been dealt with when making fixes.  It also allows you to make partial fixes to problems, instead of having to tackle a mega-problem (which you might not want to do).

“Who should I get to evaluate the interface?”

This seems to be a major sticking point for companies and individuals new to performing heuristic evaluation.  Don’t let this stop you. Sure, usability professionals (“expert evaluators”) are preferred as they are more skilled at finding usability issues than non-experts, but they are not required.  If you don’t have the budget to hire usability gurus to evaluate your site, it’s not the end of the world.  You can do this with non-experts and still gain a lot of insight into the problems with your interface.  Qualities to look for in potential evaluators (ranked in order of importance):

• a heartbeat
• they have not used the UI before
• they are potential users of your UI

If a user only meets the first criteria, they are still a valid test user and will give you valuable insight into problems with your UI.  The other criteria are nice to have in an evaluator, but not necessary.  Not having used the UI before is a bonus, because they have no expectations.  Getting potential users of your UI to evaluate it is a good way to see how your target demographic responds to it.

“What will I gain by doing a heuristic evaluation?”

The results are pretty incredible: with only 3 to 5 non-expert users evaluating an interface, most of the major usability issues are discovered.  It’s wise to do a new round of heuristic evaluation after each re-design: the benefits you gain from it outweigh the time required to do the evaluation.  When this is no longer true, then your design is most likely relatively stable .

“What are the problems with heuristic evaluation?”

Actually, people generally don’t ask this question.  But they should .

A heuristic evaluation is not a golden bullet:  it is a useful tool and will help to identify usability issues with an interface, but it’s got pitfalls too.

An obvious problem with heuristic evaluation is that it identifies problems, not solutions.  You and your team still need to come up with the solutions and ways to correct the identified issues.  You can solicit feedback from the users that identified the problems, as they usually are happy to give their ideas (after all, they did find the problems).

Another problem with HE is that the issues identified by the users depend on the list of heuristics that you use to evaluate the interface.  People will look for problems that fit into the heuristics, and this can limit the scope of the problems that are identified.  Nielson’s heuristics are a very useful collection of usability principles, but are they all that you need?  Heuristics specific to the domain of your application may be of more value.  For example, if you’re evaluating an online store creating trust is essential, but there’s nothing in the heuristics about trust.

“Is heuristic evaluation the only usability method I need to use?”

I wish I could say yes, but the truth is, no, it’s not.  It’s a great place to start, and if you have a limited usability budget and are on tight deadlines, then heuristic evaluation is a good way to identify the major issues with your software.  It can be easily integrated into design cycles at little cost.  However, heuristic evaluation is not a substitution for user testing.  Different usability inspection methods give different benefits.  The types of problems you identify with HE are going to be different than what you identify with user testing, and vice versa.

And now…

Go and perform a heuristic evaluation!  If you’ve never done one yourself, get a list of heuristics (Nielson’s are the most famous and widely accepted) and perform a heuristic evaluation.  Do it on your own website if you have one, and if not, any website that you read/use regularly.  Next, get a few friends to perform an evaluation on the site, and see what you come up with.  You might be pleasantly surprised.

…usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing–whether it’s a Web site, a fighter jet, or a revolving door– for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.

I just couldn’t quite put my finger on what that something really was.  I tried to let it go and tackle to seemingly impossible pile of work I have to do, but I just couldn’t get it out of my head.  I started to stress out, and that’s when it hit me…

Preusability Issue: Overwhelming Your Users

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Then, when I started reflecting on my recent experiences with unusable software, it hit me:  most of the time, I gave up before I started.  I didn’t feel frustrated, I simply felt overwhelmed.  This is a very important difference.

I am an amateur musician, and have at various times in the last decade attempted to make music on my computer.  I have primarily used Reason, and Cubase, but I have never gotten very far.  Why?  Because when I start to use the software, I get in there, click a few buttons, and feel overwhelmed with the perceived complexity of it.  I then promptly shut it down.  I don’t give software a chance to frustrate me, because I’m gone before I’ve really started.

The problem of feeling overwhelmed is not limited to advanced music making software. I am currently using a BlackBerry.  I love it… for the most part.  It’s my first smart phone experience, and we’re currently in our newlywed phase.  I look into the shiny surface, smiling, and I see me smiling back.  We do everything together.  She makes me feel secure when I’m in an awkward social setting.  I feel better when walking down the street, holding her (in my) hand.  I love to turn her on in the morning, but have recently just kept her turned on all night…. Ack, I digress.

My new love aside, sometimes I want to change the options on my BlackBerry.  And on those occasions, I have ventured into the depths of the Options menu only to find myself completely overwhelmed by the staggering lists upon lists of options.  Not knowing where to start, I just back out.  Granted, in reality, if I took 20 minutes to learn the options, I would probably have no problem finding what I was looking for in the future. The real issue here is that the presentation made me feel as though overcoming the complexity would require too much effort and I left before even trying to accomplish my original goal.

The creative process takes on generally the same shape regardless of what it is that you’re creating. You identify a need, come up with an idea, and then you implement it… right?

No! This is not right. Unfortunately though, this is what happens far too often in practice. This post is all about process; having the right approach is they key to creating something usable (be it a hammer, a cell phone, or, in our example, a website). A good approach is worth many, many genius programmers.

Common Approaches

Let’s examine a few very real, commonly occurring scenarios.  For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume that you’re involved in the creation of a website (though, it could be anything). You’ve got the idea, and now you’re itching to get cracking and turn dreams into reality. Here are three possible scenarios to move forward from the idea to the implementation:

Bad (the Lone Ranger Approach): You take your idea to some programmers and web designers in the form of a written specification, and get them to implement it.  They do it; the nuts and bolts are in place and you’re ready to roll it out to customers. Now, for the first time, you show it to your users.

Better (the Talk to Tonto Approach): You take your idea, make some sketches, draw up some designs, write a requirements document, and take it to your web development team.  Part of the way through the website implementation (let’s say, after the home page and the primary functionality are implemented) you meet with the group and run through some possible things that your customers will typically want to do on the site (“use cases”).  Based on your interaction with the site, you make some modifications, and then continue the development.

Best (The Usability Approach): You take your idea, and create sketches of a handful of the most important screens in the site as you envision them.  Maybe you even mock up a prototype in Excel, PowerPoint, or HTML.  You take these artifacts to some people that you consider potential users of your site-to-be and have them run through a few use cases.  Because the sketches/prototype are not functional, the users simply tell you what they’d expect to happen when they clicked on things, and you’d take them to the next “screen” manually.  You collect as much feedback as you can on their reactions.  You then modify the sketches/prototype based on their feedback, and then repeat this process numerous times until you have a design that users interact with without much trouble.  Then you take it to the web development team.

Up-front Usability Work = Better Long Term Results

It’s this simple:  the more you integrate usability testing in an iterative design process before you write any code (as outlined in #3 above), the better the end result will be.

Re-read the sentence above.  It is a one sentence paragraph (and this is not an accident; it’s that important).  Take one minute, close your eyes, and really think about it.

Identify flaws early

By integrating potential users into the design process, you identify flaws in your design that you or your team members cannot recognize yourselves.  This is because you’re too close to the ideas and too attached to the design.  You’re so deep inside the ideas and design that because you know exactly how to achieve your goals, you assume that your solutions are clear to other people too.  Having just a few users look at the proposed interface during each iteration will bring many of the key issues in the design to your attention.

Reduce resistance to change

People are attached to their work.  My work.  Mine.  When somebody suggests that your work is not perfect, by extension, it is suggesting that you are not perfect.  And almost nobody wants to admit that.  But it’s the cold, hard truth.  We are not all-seeing beings, and having other people point this out can hurt.  The more we are attached to our work, the more it hurts.

So how can we avoid this attachment?

First, don’t expect yourself to be flawless – you are human.  Do your best work, but don’t expect it to be perfect.  Be open to the fact that your design is probably not perfect, and be looking to improve.

Second, get feedback early:  the more time and energy you put into your work, the more you have invested emotionally in the results.  If you are heavily invested in a design, you will not want to change it.  You will be resistant to hearing criticism of your design.  Your ego will protect you (and all the work you’ve done) by telling you to that the others are fools and don’t understand; that they are mistaken, and that you are great (and your design is superior).  But this is a fool’s path.  The foolish thing to do is invest yourself heavily without getting feedback before you’re resistant to hearing it.  Wisdom is the ability to see things from many angles — the more perspective you get through feedback with your users, the better your design will be.  A fool stands alone.

Believing without using is like smelling good food without tasting it

Just like everything else in usability, the Usability Approach seems so straightforward after it’s pointed out.  “Of course this is the best approach to designing usable things, silly.”  Yet, time and time again, I see people underestimating the value of including users in the design process.  They simply go charging blindly ahead down the implementation path without consulting with the people that will actually use the site.  Don’t be one of these people.

Undoubtedly there will be people who read this post, nodding in agreement the whole way through, that immediately go back and disregard the advice.  This post is not intended to be a neck exercise.  It’s great if you have found some truth in this, but don’t just believe me; go and try it out.  Judge it based on your own experience.

Resisting the Usability Approach

Why do people resist?  Here are three of the most common reasons I hear:

1. We don’t have time.

Reading this post has taken you as much time as it will to run a few users through some basic tasks with your preliminary sketches.  You made time to read this post; make the time to really make use of it.  Notice that I said “made time” instead of “took time”?  It’s all about priorities.  When somebody says they don’t have time to do something, they really are saying “it’s not a high enough priority for me to invest my time doing that.”  Which leads to the next common reason…

2. It’s hard to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of usability work.

I could quote Nielson’s study on how usability continues to have a very positive ROI.  But I don’t need to.  Why?  Because if you allow yourself a few minutes to do a very simple test of this process with even one user the next time you are creating a website (or anything), you will see such substantial improvements in your design that you will understand the value in this process through your own experience.  And as we all know, seeing is believing.

3. We don’t have the resources.

What resources don’t you have?  Is it the two or three people that are required to give you some feedback?  Or is it the few minutes, or *gasp* hours (if you want to be really thorough) that it would take to do this?

Ideally you’ll be able to get potential users of your site to do the testing, but if you can’t, anybody will do.  One thing that people love to do, is give their opinion.  It should not be hard to find a few people willing to give you a few minutes of their time in exchange for having an opportunity to give their (obviously highly valuable) opinions.

No, it can’t be that.  It must be the time required to actually do the testing.  Collecting feedback from users can be done in a matter of hours (from start to finish).  How many hours do you waste every day doing things like checking Facebook, reading tweets, reading the news, etc.?  And what is the potential return on those?  Do you do these activities during your “work time?”  Need I say more?

Seeing is Believing

I can’t be more straightforward than this:  it’s easy, do it.  If it works for you (and I’m confident it will), keep doing it.  If not, consider it a science experiment, and a valuable educational experience that cost you very little.  Be your own judge.  You’ll see the results.

So, you can understand how quickly my satisfaction turned to emotional catastrophe when I found myself deer-eyed when confronted with the question, “So, what exactly is usability?”  I floundered for a few minutes, then said some nonsensical sentence filled with fluffy superlatives designed to obfuscate the fact that I hadn’t taken the time to really think about this most obvious question.  So, humbled, I took to the place of knowledge…

A quick Google search for usability returned a wide variety of responses to the seemingly simple question “What is usability?”  The range of responses was really quite incredible.  I couldn’t believe it, but I could not find one unified, reasonable definition of what usability is.  Examining the definitions and abstracting their ideas, I found a few key ideas repeated throughout:

1. Usability relates to how easy it is to use an object to achieve specific goals.

This is the one thing that is central to the definition of usability in almost all cases. One definition includes the stipulation that it must be easy to use without specific training.  That seems reasonable: usability is about how easy it is to use things.

2. Usability is a measure.

The US government defines usability as is the measure of quality of a user’s experience when using a website.  Another definition states that it’s the measure of the potential of a product to accomplish a user’s goals.  Okay, so usability is a measure.

3. Usability is defined by a number of qualities.

Many definitions of usability include lists of qualities that a product must have in order to be deemed usable.  Qualities that are frequently listed include:

• learnability
• efficiency
• error tolerability
• effectiveness
• engaging

After reading all of these definitions, I couldn’t help but feeling… disappointed.  To summarize what I’d learned through this exercise, I asked myself “okay, so what is usability?”

“Well, usability is the ability use something easily to accomplish a specific goal (or set of goals) that a user wants to achieve.  There are a number of factors that make something usable including… It relates to the … ugh.  This is all crap.”

Clearly, I wasn’t convinced.  It’s a no-brainer to write sentences like “usability is the art and science of … with respect to… <list a bunch of desirable qualities here>”.  This sounds somewhat professional, and to the non-critical mind, convincing.  But what does it mean?  What makes something easy to use?  What kind of measure is usability?  What are we really measuring?

So, my search continued.

I read further, probing the Internet for answers, searching deeper and deeper only to find more lists of factors that make things usable.  At least almost everybody agrees on that usability has something to do with using something to achieve a goal.  I just kept reading, and I got nowhere.

To make matters worse, as I was typing, my computer stopped registering all of my keystrokes so half of my words appeared misspelled and I had to spend half of my time going back and correcting “my” mistakes (which were not my mistakes at all, but the fault of the system I use to write my blog).  I just coldn’t hlpbut feing lke th definiton o usabiliy ws missing something very imporant, but I cldn’t quite put m fingeron what tht fctor ws…

FRUSTRATION SET IN.  I felt hopeless.  Convinced that nobody knows what usability is, (especially the manufacturers of my keyboard), I went to bed.

— The next day —

This morning, as I recovered from my nightmares of my inability to find or come up with a functional definition of usability, I was performing my usual morning rituals (I’ll spare you the details) which generally includes some good reading.  And there it was!  The definition I was looking for!  In Steve Krug‘s great book on Web Usability, in plain English that just makes sense, he writes:

…usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing–whether it’s a Web site, a fighter jet, or a revolving door– for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.

As I read it, a rush of pleasant tingling sensations swept over my body.  It just felt right.  Beautifully articulated, it encompasses all of my conceptions about usability.  No fancy words, no long lists, just the plain and simple truth.  Now that’s practising what you preach.

But this still leaves some lingering questions:  What makes a site easy to use?  How do you measure a site’s usability?  These are valid questions, and I will be answering them in other posts.

Great, you’ve decided you need to have a website!  Super.  …now what?

Feeling overwhelmed?  You’re not alone.  I have a degree in computer science and the thought of having my own domain both excited and terrified me.  Allow me to debunk some common website building myths, and then help you get your own WordPress website up and running in a matter of minutes.  I’m going to write this so that even my parents can understand it.  Don’t get me wrong, I love them dearly, but if I get another email asking me what the new green flashing icon that looks like a spider web that’s just magically shown up on their computer is, I may consider a vasectomy (to avoid doing this to my own unborn children sometime down the road).

By the end of this post (in about 5 minutes time), you will have all the information you need to start your own website.  I’m not kidding.

Myth #1) Building a website is expensive.

You can create professional looking websites, for free using WordPress.  Sure, building a website can be expensive: if you want to run a site like Amazon, you’re going to end up shelling out a lot of money to do so.   However, if you have more basic needs and just want to have a professional looking site, it can also be done for free.  It all depends on your needs.  Running your own site to blog, share photos, promote yourself or your small business, display your art, etc., then you can do all of this by yourself, with a few clicks of a mouse, for free.  You may be surprised how much you can do with freely available software these days, and how easy it is to use and setup.

Myth #2) Building a website is hard.

Setting up a professional looking website can be done by someone with relatively few computer skills in a matter of minutes.  You no longer need to know any HTML, or have programming skills to run your own website.  Of course, if you want to perform complicated database operations and create your own custom widgets, you will need some skills.  The truth is that most users simply don’t need these things (and chances are if you’re reading this, you don’t either).

Myth #3) WordPress is only for blogging.

If you’ve heard of WordPress and know it only as a blog site, there’s good reason for that: WordPress.com is one of the largest blogging sites on the internet.  However, WordPress.org offers free website publishing software that is used to power millions of professional looking websites.  There are literally thousands of non-blogging sites on the Internet that are running on WordPress.  There are WordPress themes for just about every type website available for free from WordPress, and an innumerable number of themes developed by people all over the world offered at a low cost or for free.

Let’s do it.

Take a deep breathe.  Have your tech-wizard son/brother/friend on speed-dial.  But this time, not to ask about the new magically appearing icons, but to show them your new website.  It’s go time.

To buy a domain, or not buy a domain?  That is the question.

First things first:  do you want to own your own domain, or do you want to simply start writing?  Owning your own domain (like www.jonathanbeer.ca) is simple and fairly low cost.  If you don’t want to buy your own domain and host your website, then simply go to WordPress.com, sign up for a account, and start writing.  For those of you that want to have your own website at your own domain (like www.jonathanbeer.ca), read on.

Buying a domain, and hosting a WordPress website

Buying a domain name and hosting your own website is no longer very difficult or very expensive.  This is the slightly more advanced option (compared to signing up for a WordPress.com account and hosting it there), but having your own domain name has a lot of advantages.  Most importantly, regardless of what you are using your site for, it gives you credibility.  Furthermore, if you change hosts (the company serving up your website to the Internet), your domain name stays the same.  Finally, it’s easy to remember (if you’ve chosen a good domain name).

Buying (aka registering) a domain name is really “leasing” a domain name for a certain period of time, for example, one year.  You can register a domain name through a number of websites.  I use GoDaddy, which is the most popular domain registration site on the Internet.  I use them because I trust them, their interface is easy to use, and their rates are competitive (you can register domains for around $10 / year, depending on the domain).

When you register a domain name using GoDaddy, it will ask you for the address of the “DNS” servers that will “resolve” your website.  Here’s what they’re talking about:  When you type a website address (like www.jonathanbeer.ca) into your address bar, that address has to be translated into an IP address (a unique number that is used to identify a computer) in order to get the website so it can be returned to you.  That process is called “domain name resolution”, and DNS servers (domain name servers) are the computers that know how to translate from the domain name into the IP address to get the website for you.  The details are not important.  What you need to know is the DNS servers of your host.  Which means that you need a host for your website.

After you have purchased a domain name, you need to create a website and have it “hosted” so when somebody types your domain name, it takes them to your website.  There are a lot of web hosting companies to choose from.  The packages they offer vary in bandwidth and storage space, and their services range from just hosting a website, to including email addresses, to actually doing the registration of a domain name for you (as part of a package), etc.  If a host will register a domain name for you as part of a package, there’s no need to register a domain name with a company like GoDaddy.  If you decide to go with a host like this, just make sure the hosting company is reputable to ensure that you are in fact the owner of the domain.

Hosts also vary widely in the technology that they support.  For us, what’s important is that they support the technology that is required to run WordPress.  Don’t worry, most web hosts do, it’s just wise to verify before you buy.  Some hosts go one step further than just supporting technology and offer easy installation of different types of websites, including WordPress.  For example, I host my sites with DreamHost and they have an excellent one-click installer for WordPress.  This is incredibly handy, and if you’ve got limited computer skills / computer phobia, I recommend looking for a host that offers a service like this.  Whatever host you decide on, just make sure to read the fine print (as you should with any contract you sign) to know exactly what you’re getting for your money.

If you have chosen to register your domain name separately from your hosting company (ie/ you registered a domain with GoDaddy), then you will need to enter the DNS servers of your host (which will be told to you when you buy a hosting package) into GoDaddy (or whoever you registered the domain with).  How to do that depends on where you registered your domain, but each site will make this part of managing your domains.

Installing WordPress

If you picked a host with a one-click installation of WordPress, then go to the host site and read about how to install WordPress using their installer, and do it — and you’re done!  You’ll have the default WordPress theme up and running on your domain.

If you picked a host that doesn’t have a one-click installation of WordPress, you’re going to need a few more computer skills (but not too many).  WordPress has an excellent set of instructions for installing WordPress.  They claim to have a 5 minute installation process (along with a far more detailed version of the instructions, don’t worry).  I’m not here to replicate those instructions, only point you in the right direction.  The WordPress forums have excellent support also, if you happen to get stuck along the way.

At this point, you now know everything you need to know to register your own domain, get your website hosted, and get your WordPress site up and running!  Congratulations!

Don’t be afraid.  Fear will hold you back from experiencing your true potential.