Technically Challenged

I sat through a deeply technical presentation today and got the chance to experience what it’s like being completely confused by some technology. It didn’t help that the presenter was unable to speak the letter ’s’ and every time the letter appeared in a word she just left a gap!

It set me thinking about the challenge of helping you, my reader, to understand all this technology that I talk about in small business website design. I try to position all my writing at the non-technical person, but even so, I get a fair number of people who find that my explanations are pitched at the wrong level.

Some people want it more technical and complain if I’m not quoting HTML syntax or talking about the latest super-tweak on SEO.

Others find any kind of technology completely confusing and if I start to talk about anything involving a website source file or a link or a cookie then they start panicking and get confused.

This is a fun challenge! The trick with explaining any kind of technology is that you need to start from a basic level of understanding and build on top of that. If you don’t have the basic level nailed down then this is where things start to get a bit difficult.

It’s fine if you’re talking to one person because you can have a chat first and find out which level to start from. It gets harder if you’re talking to a group of people. You can still discuss their knowledge level but the levels may be different so you’ve then got to help all of them together to understand your techie talk. It gets harder again if you’re writing for readers who you can’t engage with directly.

The good news is that by choosing a target audience who is non-technical, I’ve narrowed down my niche so that I stand a better chance of writing stuff that you’ll be able to use. I’m making the assumption that small business owners are a clever bunch, but that they probably don’t speak native CSS or PHP. I always make the promise that I’ll leave the white coat by the door! That’s far easier than trying to write techie stuff that works for everyone.

I encourage you to contact me by leaving a blog comment, or chatting on Facebook or Twitter, to let me know if you find that my stuff is hitting the right level for you.

PS. I’m about to start a 4 week road trip so apologies in advance if it seems like I’m ignoring your nice feedback

Tags: niche, Small Business Website

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.