Gift vouchers

A couple of weeks before Christmas last year, a friend asked me if I would produce a computer lesson gift voucher as a present for his father-in-law. The business was very new then and I was pleased to get any 'lead' I could. I was also pleased to be given this gift voucher idea, so I set to and produced one for him. I rather suspect that it was a little dig at father-in-law to do something about his computer skills - I think my friend and his wife wanted to 'pass the buck' to a professional!

But with Christmas coming round again I thought I'd have a few vouchers ready. And since two pupils had postponed today's lessons through illness I suddenly had a bit of spare time to produce half a dozen...here's one!



I'll put an ID number on the back - hey! I could produce a GUID with guidgen.exe - that would be really scarily geeky!

Then all I have to do is advertise them...tricky! Any ideas? Anyone else doing lesson vouchers?

Colin

Attached to email

I think the biggest topic I teach my clients is email. It's certainly one of the most important for them, up there with 'looking up things on the Internet'. Most of my clients are 60+ and their children have grown up and left home. The children have persuaded the parents that they need a computer. The best-case scenario is that the parents go out and buy themselves a new one. The worst-case is where the children hand over an old one...and I have plenty of stories about that!

So using the Internet is the main thing - and using email is a regular topic for my lessons. I could go off into the topic right now - webmail vs. mail clients, spam, deleting, saving, creating/composing (why can't they just describe it as 'writing'?) - but this would make a very long posting!

When a client is very new to email I always send a mail just before the lesson to make sure that there is something in the Inbox. I sometimes send a 'spoof' too - just to illustrate that there are people out there who mimic 'banking' emails. My harmless spoof usually comes from a well-known senior politician...he's been very useful in helping me teach about emails!

Here are two other guys who continue to help me out:


I always use this picture to illustrate email 'attachments'. It always fascinates my pupils and many of them want to save the picture, which leads conveniently into another topic!

Each night for the last 8 or 9 years badgers have been coming right up to my mother's window where she lives in Dorset. Sometimes as many as four pay a visit. I took this photo with a film camera and flash, just by holding the camera right up against the glass. The badgers didn't flinch - they just kept right on chomping away. They know they're on to a good thing!

Thanks, guys - keep on coming. You've no idea how many people are so attached to you!

Colin

A week has flown

Well just look at the time! Gone midnight - and this is early for me! It's a full week since I last 'blogged', so this is just to say that I am really busy! Not quite as busy with lessons as I was two weeks ago, but extremely busy fulfilling all the promises I have made to several pupils about preparing 'manuals' for them.
It reflects the stage that they have got to, because after 3-4 lessons - certainly after 4 lessons - I feel that I ought to produce something better than the hand-written notes that I take during the lessons. So I turn the notes into illustrated A4 pages, either in MS "Word" or OpenOffice.org "Writer", laminate them and present them in a hard-back personalised binder. It's all 'part of the service' and I hope it reinforces my principle of selling my service on quality rather than price.

But it does take time! Every pupil is different, not to mention their computers! Eventually I hope to have built up a bank of units so that all I need to do is select the various units, put them together and present them. But while there are now likely to be at least three different MS operating systems around and heaven knows how many different webmail boxes in addition to Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail...well, it's all keeping me very busy.

So now, at sixteen minutes past Tuesday, I'm off to a well-earned rest.


Colin

Aaaarrrgh! Stop Press!!!

I went into my local supermarket on Saturday morning and saw my first Christmas tree (since January 2009, that is!)
I have already seen the odd 'Santa' and reindeer in a few shop windows but this was the first Tree. It's eight feet high and totally synthetic.

I'm just a Grumpy Old Man, I suppose. I know that shops have to sell stuff and that they've had Festive Cards available since September - not to mention the mountains of 'Quality Street' etc. but...but...harrumph!!

And then it got worse. I went out that afternoon, to a village a few miles out of Hereford, to put some leaflets through doors...and I saw my first domestic Christmas tree! 7th November and someone already had the Christmas tree up.

Trouble is, we've done Hallowe'en and we've done Bonfire Night and now there's nothing to celebrate until C-----mas. The Americans have got Thanksgiving yet to come, so I suppose they don't make such a fuss about X--s until it's a bit nearer December?

Anyone else enjoy a good harrumph???

Colin

Pimp my ride!

I've been waiting to show you this since Wednesday, but what with an exceptionally busy week and then the English November weather it's taken me til now to make this post.

Here she is...



My wild garden/car park does look a little scruffy at this time of year, so I was determined to find a better backdrop for these portraits. These are taken just around the corner from a new client.

Perhaps the white outlining is a little heavy, but I'm generally happy that I've had it done.

My son says I won't need to lock the car now...no-one would steal it. Thanks, son!

Now I need a sharper photograph to go on the website - the website needs another picture or two.

Mind how you go on the roads...I have to make sure I'm always super-polite now everyone can identify me!

Colin

The Explorers

Two topics that I find I'm always introducing to my clients are

• making an Address Book or Contact List for their email
• making 'Favorites' (as Internet Explorer calls them) or 'Bookmarks' as in Firefox.

They're similar in that they both save you the bother of having to type addresses - email adresses or URLs - which can be long and complicated. My clients are always very grateful for these discoveries and we spend some time practising and making sure they know how to do it. Favourite 'Favorites' - if you see what I mean - are Google, Ebay, Amazon, BBC, budget airlines etc. And if my client uses webmail I make sure that their email inbox - or as near as we can get to it - is a favourite too.

I must admit that I've been a little sneaky just recently. I've been adding my own website to their Favorites/Bookmarks...as an example of the technique, you understand... but OK, also as a brazen publicity 'plug'! Last week I tried to add my URL to a gentleman's newly-discovered list of Favorites by the usual method - type the URL into the browser address window / hit Return / Favorites menu / Add to Favorites etc. etc... but was horrified then to see my website's 'Home' page looking a right mess! The pictures and the navigation bar were overflowing in various directions and I just quickly closed it all before he'd had a chance to look!

My client is using Windows ME on a PC which must be 9-10 years old with one of those old monitors which are twice as deep as the screen is wide. It's only a 13" screen and the gentleman has to scroll across as well as down for most of the webpages he looks at - very frustrating and difficult. So he's seriously thinking of upgrading. He's fairly new to using the Web and I think I managed to excuse myself to him.

But as I drove home I certainly hadn't excused myself to myself! All that advice I'd read about testing testing testing. I could only suppose that I'd just seen my website on Internet Explorer 6 and it didn't take me long to realise that there must be several other people who had similarly old computers who might try to visit my website. After all, I am about to feature my website address on my car - and it already features on my business cards in Sainsbury's. (But THAT'S another blog-story!)

So this weekend I tried to get myself Internet Explorer 6. I wondered if I could download it without affecting my current browser and I did find some download that said you could install 'legacy browsers' without compromise. But it didn't work - or I couldn't get it to work - and I'm always very cagey about downloads anyway, so I deleted it.

And then I remembered that I still had my daughter's old 'Time' computer, which she started using in 1997 and kept as her PC until at least 2004. It's still running Windows 98 and I was pretty sure that the browser would be IE 6. So I cranked it up today, copied my website files onto a floppy disk (remember those?) and transferred the files to her computer. Sure enough, the browser is Internet Explorer 6 so I took a deep breath and opened up the index file, expecting the worst.

It was perfect! I was so pleased, because IE6 is reckoned to be the 'bugbear' of the common browsers but one that you should still try to allow for in your web design. So now I know that my site works OK in Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorers 6-8, Google Chrome and Safari.

The only question remaining is: what has my client got? My daughter's PC is older than his but she probably updated her original browser at some stage. I think my client still has IE5.5 or something even earlier!

So when I see him again I shall update his browser as far as it will go...and then add my website to his Favorites!

And, as a budding web designer with plenty yet to learn, I'm grateful to those web gurus who very pragmatically advise that one can only go so far back in the browser minefield.

I see some of you design your own and other people's websites. Any advice about websites, browsers, 'hacks' etc?

Colin