I had a similar experience volunteering for Rails Bridge a few months ago:
Once we got everything installed, which was a nightmare in itself ("no, Dave, you do not copy the quotes in"), we had to deal with actual "web" stuff.
Me: "Alright guys, refresh your browser to see your changes!"
Student 1: "What's the 'browser?'" Student 2: "How do I refresh?" Student 3: "Why can't I go to any websites?" (they were typing the URL in the command line)
I took for granted the technical environment I grew up in; most people don't even know how to use the software they use every day to browse Facebook. And I don't blame them, they don't teach this stuff in school.
Re:WordPress is not easy
by maxwelljoslyn on Sunday February 28, 2016 @09:44PM
(#11193363)
Thanks for sharing your tutorial. It looks like it'll carry me through the hosting end of things, and corroborates what I'v heard elsewhere about S3 being a good way to go for static sites.
http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/using-a...
Note that I didn't go over things like, "What is S3", or "What is AWS"...or even web domain hosting, or even "What is HTML". It simply involved making a quickie HTML file and uploading it to S3 via the AWS web panel, and then visiting the URL...being able to put something on the web of their complete creation (rather than through a CMS) is pretty revelatory for newbies.
So where did people get stuck? Some people didn't have an Amazon account yet. Easy enough, they created one. But then one student had a hell of a time just getting into AWS. Hearing her describe her problems, I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I watched as she tried to log in...well, you know how Amazon, like most modern services, allow you to use email addresses as your username? That greatly simplifies things, as most of us would agree...but for some novices, they don't realize that logging in on `[email protected]` on Amazon (nevermind AWS) is not the same as doing it for `[email protected]` on _GMail_.
How does such a person survive on the modern Web, where emails are generally used as the user ID? I'm guessing they just have been blithely reusing GMail credentials for all their other accounts which they use their GMail address as their user ID.
This doesn't have much to directly do with the complexity of creating a site via a CMS, perhaps....except that if you're a veteran web developer, it's very very difficult to imagine what is confusing to a novice...We think that Wordpress is easy compared to say, Drupal...sure...but that's not the level of thinking that novices work at. For them, it's more, "Where do I write my program that makes the website?", and all of the fallacies and ambiguities that question entails.
That said...not sure why the author has to care about anything beyond how to set up things for Wordpress.org. If we're talking newbies here, let them use the vanilla Wordpress.org, and then let them worry about self-hosting later.