Going Mobile

God is taking us yet another direction. We are in the process of selling our home and becoming full-time RVers. Alas, this means that we will be unable to conduct our workshops from our home anymore.

I am going to continue website coaching and smaller design projects. I’ll just be doing it from wherever I happen to be. We’ll also be rebranding from our current Website Workshops to the more appropriate Nomad Websites name.

I apologize to those of you that wanted to attend one of our future workshops. I will continue to be available for 1-on-1 training while I am in the area.

Adding Website Workshops Forum

I’m looking into selection of a forum (bulletin board) for use with Build a Website Workshops as well as for my WordPress plugin. For Workshops I want something that integrates nicely with Joomla! but I may choose something different for my WordPress plugins since it needs to integrate nicely with WordPress 🙂
At first glance, Joo!BB looks attractive. However, forum.joomla.org uses phpBB. I’m guessing that this might be because they selected phpBB long ago, and it doesn’t make sense to switch even if there are better options now.
I’m going to try installing joo!BB on my BuildAWebsiteWorkshops.com site and see how it works.

Website Workshops

We’re heading off in a new direction regarding my job. God has been tugging at me to do something “different” but it wasn’t until this week that He’s told me what that is.

I’ve been thinking that I need to help small churches, and maybe small, struggling businesses to setup their website. I’ve also felt that God would show me how I can do this without sacrificing making a living and supporting my family. These two things appear to work against each other though.

I had thought at first that I could help others as a website consultant. But doing the math, I think I would need to charge $80 to $120 per hour. This is pretty much on the lower side of the pay scale for website consulting. Medium to large businesses can afford this, but I can’t see how I can help poor struggling churches and businesses this way.

I woke up the other night worrying about this, and prayed to God asking Him to show me how this was going to work. The answer came almost immediately. I’m going to start running “Website Workshops”. I’m already planning on doing something similar for the folks at my church. I’ll be teaching them how to edit the church’s web pages. Each team leader will need to maintain their own team pages.

I’m going to start offering workshops to individuals and small businesses that want to create and manage their own websites. Attendees will need to bring their laptop computer with them, and I’ll walk them through each step in creating and maintaining it. When the attendees leave my workshop, they will have a working, simple website and the knowledge on how to maintain it.

I expect to be able to do this in a half day session, but might extend it to a full day if I am underestimating things. I’m not settled on a price yet, but I’m thinking either $99 or $199 for a half day session. Every time I tell folks about this I get a very positive response, and a comments like “Ok! I’m your first customer.” I have a lot of first customers 🙂

So I’m not really job hunting anymore. I’m trying to get “Ron Lisle d/b/a Website Workshops” going. I’ll be having some free, trial workshops at the church over the next month, and hope to have real, paying workshops running by the end of March. This approach is going to allow me to work from home, eventually running workshops 2 days a month.

God is amazing. I knew that He had something really great planned for me, and I have been hanging in there waiting for Him to show me. I am so excited about this new venture. My head is still spinning. There are still those nagging doubts in the back of my head, but I’m trying to just pray those away.

God is awesome!