I met up with two friends the other night. Both are amateur photographers. At one point they fell to discussing the relative merits of two lenses. They talked about F numbers, focal lengths, bokeh, fast and slow lenses, chromatic aberration and I was soon pretty lost. I think I glazed over at one point and drifted off into my own thoughts for a while. If I, as a non-photographer, had been expected to make a decision about which of the two lenses was better after that conversation I’d have been pretty stuffed.

The problem wasn’t with the conversation subject matter. It was all just pitched way over my head. It’s very easy, when you know a subject well, to slip into the language of that subject, which can leave non-experts feeling very lost indeed. This is often the case with web design. Lots of the concepts involved with web site design can be a bit difficult to grasp if you have only limited computer knowledge. Web designers bandy phrases about like ‘brochure web sites’,’database driven websites’, ‘key word analysis’, and acronyms like ‘SEO’ and people look either terrified or bored witless.

But if you’re going to invest in a web site with the hope that it will grow your business, it’s going to be really handy to understand just a little bit about the concepts involved. That way you can make better, more informed decisions.

So to help explain some of these concepts I’ve invented a fictional business, ‘Stan’s Wonderful Widgets’ and my blog will follow him as he learns to use his web site and the internet in a more productive way.

And I promise that I’ll do my best not to terrify you or bore you to death in the process!