EE Insider

Use screencasts to train clients.

• Posted by Philip Zaengle
• May 29, 2009
• 3 people have found this tip helpful.

Over a year ago I started using screencasts to train clients on ExpressionEngine. It’s saved me about a bazzilion hours, and made clients less annoying.

There are no real generic EE setups (for me anyway). There are always new addons, better ways of doings things, and (hopefully) new versions of ExpressionEngine coming out. Because of that there’s no good way that I’ve found to create generic ee documentation for clients.

So instead of (or in addition to, depending on the client / budget) face to face training I’ve found it incredibly useful to record a screencast of logging into the control panel and performing administrative tasks. I usually cover one big topic per screencast, and include 4 -6 small tasks.

Such as: Creating a new Blog entry, adding content to a blog entry, editing the entry after it’s saved, changing status, managing comments, and removing entry auto(magically) by date, or by deletion. 

This has dramatically reduced ‘how do I…’ phone calls, and increased my productivity. Some clients only edit their site every-month or so, and tend to forget how to do basic things, this is a nice little reminder.

Edit:
I’ve used a number of different recording applications. But currently I use ScreenFlow, mainly because it’s fast and easy to use.

Feel free to @philipzaengle me with any questions!