Once you get to our website at www.techboomers.com, you might be a little overwhelmed by the different options that you find. If that’s the case, here’s a quick rundown of pretty much everything on our website.
Home page
This is what you’ll see when you first arrive at TechBoomers.com. We’ll start with what’s at the top of the screen.
Home page – top
The buttons that you see here will appear on pretty much every page, so it might be a good idea to remember what they do.
If you’re ever lost on our website, click the Techboomers logo in the top-left corner to go back to the homepage.
Clicking Sign Up starts the process of creating an account on Techboomers. Doing so lets you keep track of the courses that you’re taking, and also lets you get our latest updates via our newsletter. Our How to Create a Techboomers Account tutorial has full instructions. If you already have an account, click Log In to get into it.
If you’re new to Techboomers, click New User? Start Here! This will take you to an introductory page that explains who we are, what we do, and how you can help us serve you (or someone you know) better.
At the top of our header (and below the abovementioned buttons) are the general categories of websites that we offer tutorials for. Click one to get a more detailed description of that category, as well as see what websites belong to that category. You can also check out our Techboomers Categories tutorial (here) for a general explanation of each one.
Finally, on the left are buttons for sharing the Techboomers website on social media. They will follow you as you scroll up or down the page. Click one of these buttons to share a link to our home page with your friends or family through Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, or plain old email. We’d really appreciate you letting more people know about us! And if you don’t know how to use any of these websites, don’t worry… we have courses for nearly all of them!
Home page – middle
Next, let’s have a look at what’s in the middle portion of the screen.
The boxes on the left (i.e. not the social media sharing buttons) show some of our popular and recently-added courses. All of our course links look like this, with the website or service’s logo, name, a brief description, and how many core lessons are in the course. To visit a course, simply click anywhere in its box.
In the top-right are buttons for following our activities on social media. Click Like or Share to log into Facebook and subscribe to our Facebook news feed, or share our Facebook page on your own news feed (respectively). Clicking Follow @Techboomers will allow you to log into Twitter and follow our account, so you’ll never miss a tweet from us! And clicking YouTube will allow you to log into YouTube and subscribe to our channel, so you’ll know when we have new video tutorials or other neat stuff ready.
Finally, if you’re an employee of a library or other institution that has technology training courses, click Library? Click To Learn More. We’ll explain the benefits of using the material you find on Techboomers in your courses, and provide a contact form if you’re interested in partnering with us. We’d love to hear from you!
Home page – bottom
The bottom of our website has some extra links that you can follow.
Contact Us takes you to information about different ways that you can get in touch with us, as well as a contact form that you can use to drop us a line. Who We Are gives you a quick rundown of what we’re doing and the team members that make it happen.
Library Partnerships takes you to the same screen as the Library? Click to Learn More link that we discussed in the previous section. And More Partnerships takes you to information on (and a contact form for) getting in touch with us about advertising on our website, having your website featured in a course, or promoting us on your website or social media feeds.
Privacy Policy tells you what information we will (or won’t) collect from you, and how we will (or won’t) use it. Terms and Conditions outline the general rules for using our website. And the buttons beside “Follow Us!” let you log into your various social media accounts (from left to right, they are Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and YouTube) and get updates on our activities over those channels.
Category page
When you click on a category across the top of the screen, you’ll be taken here.
In the top-left corner are what are known as the “breadcrumbs”. These show you the sequence of links that you clicked on to get to this point;they show up on course and tutorial pages, too. Simply click one of the words here to take you back to one of the previous pages that you visited.
Near the top of the page, you will see all of the websites and applications in this category that we have full courses for. Like on our home page, simply click anywhere in a course’s box to visit that course page and see the tutorials.
At the bottom of the page is a list of websites that we’re planning to offer lessons on in the future. In the meantime, we’ll usually still have some brief articles on what the website is about and a review of its good and bad points.
We also have a commenting function if you have a suggestion for a website course that we could put together for this category. Simply log into Facebook, then click in the box that says “Add a Comment”, write what you want to say, and then click Post. (We have a Facebook course if you need help getting started on Facebook.)
This tool appears on course and tutorial pages, too. So, if there’s a function for a website or application that we didn’t cover and you’d like to know about it, or there was something unclear in one of our lessons, let us know and we’ll look into it for you!
Course page
This appears once you click on a website or application. On the left is a list of the tutorials in this course, organized by subcategory; click one to take you to its page. The ones with a checkmark beside them are the “core” tutorials for the course that need to be completed before the course is considered finished. Greyed out checkmarks indicate lessons that you haven’t completed yet. Green checkmarks denote lessons that you’ve marked as completed. See our tutorial on taking and completing courses for more information.
On the right is a box explaining what the website does in a little more detail, as well as a button that, if clicked, will take you to the website itself. Above that is a button that allows you to add this button to your My Courses page (which you will see when you create an account and log in), so you can track your progress for this course. (A progress tracker will appear in this button’s place if you are already tracking this course.)
And, of course, if you like our tutorials for this website and think they would be useful to people you know, be sure to click the buttons beside “Share” in the top-right corner (see our Support Techboomers tutorial under the “Share our Tutorials” section for more information on how to share our content). Whether they hear about us through Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or email, we’d love to have someone new drop by and learn from us!
Oh, and you can also use the commenting function at the bottom (if you’re logged into — or logged into our website through — Facebook) if you have a suggestion on a function for the website or application that you’d like to know about and that we haven’t covered yet.
Tutorial page
This is the page where the magic happens: we give you information and step-by-step instructions on how to use the features of the website you’ve selected. You can click one of the options in the upper-right menu to mark the tutorial as completed (doing so will add the course to My Courses if you haven’t done so already), go back to the main course page, print this tutorial, or visit the website that the course is for.
There is also another menu further down the right-hand side, with a list of other tutorials in this course. Click one to quickly jump to another tutorial for the same course.
You can also click the buttons at the bottom of the page to move to the previous or next tutorial for that website.
And, like on a course page, you can also use the functions at the bottom of the page to share the lesson with your friends and family over social media. You can also leave a comment if you have a question or suggestion about the tutorial, such as if something wasn’t quite clear for you or you ran into a roadblock.
Oh, one last thing… some of our tutorials have video companions, which will show up at the top of the screen before the actual text. Just click one to start playing it. They work the same as they do on YouTube, so visit our YouTube course if you need help figuring out how the player works.
And that’s a quick tour of how to use our website, from top to bottom!
