Power Sellers Unite

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

Hi. There are lots of good html and css guides, including many great ones right here in this forum that I can see.

But not everyone is able to just plow through an online tutorial and "get it". Are you someone who just keeps hitting a "wall"?

I have applied my skills as an art teacher leading people through exercises in basic drawing to teaching html so that you end up being able to "read" a page of code and "see" it the way a musician can "read" sheet music and "hear" the melody.

This takes work and exercise drills. I go online into the same control panel of a good clean free host as my student and the student works with blank editting (or offline with plain old notepad) and builds by ear. We work an hour at a time several times a week at the student's pace.

I cannot do this for free. I charge $25 through a listing in my eBay store and the person gets my attention for five full months. I take on 10 people at a time, and it actually only takes about 10 sessions to get the first level, so spreading it out over five months works for everyone's flexibility.

There is also a private group in eBay open only to the members of this class and there are threads in there on many different aspects of eBay and Web design and related topics.

One of the most valuable things I have to offer is helping you learn how to sell a special service in eBay. When you can do that, you can free yourself of all the extra inventory and shipping expenses that pile on top of fees. You can have a class going to cover your overhead alongside whatever items you sell.

You don't have to teach something like HTML, what ever you have learned in life, you can teach.

So while you may be taking my class in order to learn how to "see" your website in code, you actually also can be using it to work out how to offer your own service class as an ebay listing.

And your service can be anything. Are you a good cook? Speak a foreign language? Do you direct a choir? Play a sport? Think about it.

I hope I am not breaking rules by posting something that charges a fee here.

I will certainly understand if a moderator considers this too commercial, but I really cannot do this type of teaching for free. It represents $50 a month at full enrollment and that equals my internet expense. I am offering it exclusively through the eBay listing because that is where I have the most concentration, and I already vetted the program through eBay's staff.

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

If anyone is interested into turning this thread into a discussion of how to actually teach web skills in a way that is useful for the learners and maintains a viable income for the teachers, please post your thoughts.

The class I am teaching has to cover so much ground that I am considering branching it out and that would require charging enough to cover income for several specialists.

My strength is that my background in curriculum design and special needs students allows me to tailor the delivery of skills-training to the learning style of the recipient.

For example, some people have ADD type disorders which interferes with how quickly or steadily thay can learn, but once they have learned something, it sticks. Another example is a person who focuses so heavily on the new information that he has to take it very literally and review it several times before using the information "comes naturally".

Both of these learning styles can be present in peoplewith average or high IQ's, and so the obstacle they face is that they cannot easily get through a normal classroom or textbook presentation. They become frustrated with the effort.

What I teach is no different from what others offer in free tutorials, but the type of continuous coaching that I do with a person requires that I have a modest income for the time I put in.

I would be happy to work along with specialists in different aspects of web business to develop this beyond my one class.

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

Update on html class:

I am putting together the 2006 packages, and the price of this general class will be $35 for six months instead of $25 for five.

I offer other more expensive packages and those who purchase the class can treat it as a deposit against another package should they decide they want one.

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

The $35 listing will be dropped at the end of December and replaced by a more expensive package, integrated with dial-up, domain & host.

This is a full-service package that goes beyond the html and into a lot of the structure of a web business. It is not a sales package, it is a "nuts & bolts" package, mainly concentrating on teaching the ability to be "fluent" in html & css so that you can work with whatever program you encounter, adjusting things to your needs and recognizing unnecessary expenses before spending the $$, even if you don't design your own pages.

alan · Joined: 10 May 2005 Posts: 281

Hi Teapotdee!

I also hope this isn't too commercial.

Would you consider doing this for Kaqoo users based on Kaqoo? Please see this thread:

http://www.powersellersunite.com/viewtopic.php?t=3420

I would like to see Kaqoo become a community site and this is exactly the community feel which is needed.

I am extremely interested in helping new site owners to change their design to reflect their individual sites and I am sure there are folks out there who would appreciate the help.

In that thread you will see that we have the link to the administration section for site owners which allows them to change design/prices/categories etc.

I would be really grateful if you could take a glance and tell me if you could introduce one of your programs based on this thread.

Best regards

Alan Skelton

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

I looked at your thread and there is a lot to digest, there. It seems that you are doing a more decentralized co-operative type of set-up than most, and I like that.

I have to charge for what I do because I have to take time with each person. This is because the free "tutorials" that many people use are good for only part of what is involved in design. They often are not useful to people who have a different learning style than the ability to read and apply a set of instructions "from the book", but once those people "get it" through a coaching style of teaching, they can go on to use tutorials and similar programs.

When I am spending time on the phone and in a control panel by chat while a client is either building a page or watching me build it, I am explaining each step and answering questions as they come up.

Sometimes it turns out that someone has failed to grasp an html tutorial because they just didn't know one particular small term and so they couldn't ask the right question in a board, but in watching them make a mistake I can say "oh, I see what you are doing, you are using a relative URL where you need an absolute URL", or something like that.

Or there may be some other obstacle. For example, one of my clients has hand tremors, and this makes copy-paste a real problem, so I used CSS to push the ads in his site and a lot of the layout code out of the way of the text and images that he will want to update, and I put white space between some parts so his tremor would not cause him to over-shoot and pull a bracket off a tag.

Sometimes I just ask questions until a client narrows an interest down in order to be able to write a more cohesive and persionally enjoyable business plan than just "sell sell sell".

This is not the kind of thing big companies are willing to do because it is labor-intensive, and it always will be.

I am trying to pull together a subscription system so that I can put time into a set number of people on a continuous basis. 100 subscribers is my target.

If you want to contact me about how I can keep a monthly "floor" of about $500 under this program, I am all ears. Perhaps with your marketing skills, you could offer the subscription plan in my site at a slightly higher level, keeping a portion for your effort and allowing the amount I already plan on, $5.95 a month, to come to me.

Also, pm me about another service that can be bundled into a subscription plan if this interests you.

alan · Joined: 10 May 2005 Posts: 281

Hi teapotdee,

This sounds to be exactly what we need on both fronts that you have mentioned.

Let me say right now that I am not asking you to do this without payment! But the site owners would pay for your consultancy! Community to us does not necessarily mean free!

I am suggesting that you provide your services to take people through the Kaqoo design so that they can modify the code to their wishes.

The main point which attracted me to your post is that Kaqoo will have a very special, simple, deal for charities, including the very small ones. They will be the exact people who will need your services as many will lack the required skills to change the site design.

May I pm you tomorrow as time is short right now? I just caught your message in time.

Best regards

Alan

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

I sent you a slightly more detailed answer by pm already.

Forgot to mention that I have admin'd and customized PHPbb boards in my checkered past as a nerd-wannabe.

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

Also, as I re-read the start of this thread, I need to update a couple of things. The eBay group is dormant. People in the class have not relied on it but have relied on chat & phone & email.

The 2006 package is $150 for the year, can be split into a $75 enrollment fee and the $5.95 month subscription, and it includes getting people through the steps of qualifying their site for their own paid ad accounts and helping them learn how to manage multiple affiliations.

I have a policy of counting each paid service as a deposit toward any upgrade to any larger package. I also do not raise the subscription price to existing subscribers if it goes up to new enrollees. I may raise it from $5.95 mo to $9.95 after the first fifty have enrolled.

teapotdee · Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 550

I am adding a "free gifs" section to the site and during member launch parties and holidays, there will be special offers and more freebies.