Learning Farcry - Ongoing Support

I am in charge of training nearly all of our clients on Farcry once a site is ready for them to begin adding/editing content. At first this can be a very large obstacle for many people because they are simply not used to thinking about certain things. Before Farcry they simply called their web/IT staff and requested a change. The next thing they new, the change was there…like magic.

One of my biggest obstacles is getting people to THINK like a developer. No, they don’t need to understand coding practices but they DO need to think about layouts, templates, libraries, trees, etc. They need to begin to grasp the site as a whole in order to manage it and the relationships that exist within it.

Even months after a site that I’ve developed goes live, I get questions like “How do I change the order of my nav?” or “How do I change the images on a page?” I am more than happy to help anyone whenever they need it. However, I am a STRONG believer in the idea that struggles result in learning. If you are forced to struggle with something, you are more likely to retain the information so you don’t have to struggle with it again.

So, while I am not going to stop answering questions and helping people when necessary, I AM going to strongly recommend that end users of Farcry join a mailing list that was created specifically for them. It is the Farcry-User group on Google and I believe it is severely under-utilized and has a very high potential for not only promoting Farcry but developing skills of those who use it on a day-to-day basis. I have subscribed to the group to be able to answer any questions that people have. I strongly recommend that anyone using Farcry join the group. I also recommend that anyone developing in Farcry push their users in the same direction.

Here is a link: http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-user