It’s all too easy when working in digital industries for people to make assumptions about what people know or that you should somehow know it all. I’ve recently started running some sessions internally, inspired by some I ran at a previous company. The aim is to create a relaxed space for people to learn more about the Internet, the web, web design, responsive design, design systems…through to coding themselves if they want to go that far.

When first trying out these ‘web basics’, many years ago, I largely improvised the sessions as a way of working out what people wanted to know, how deep do people want to go into a particular topic, etc. I’ve tried to keep that as part of the structure as I’ve run more sessions. It’s daunting to run with nothing more than a starting point, a sense of a rough story and a pen — but it’s a fun challenge! As much as trying to teach, there’s a great learning curve in how to have a sense of narrative in your head, sketch some rough diagrams out while trying to talk about the topics at quite a high, hopefully relatable level.

Setting the scene

At the start, I aim to reassure people that it’s a safe space and that there are no stupid questions and no judgment about what people know or don’t know but that we’ll start from the basics and assume no prior knowledge. Hopefully this works as a leveller and sets the scene.

Depending on the audience, the way the story goes changes as people ask questions, want to go back over a bit or happy to move faster. Often, it goes a bit like…

• What the Internet is — often sharing a link to the first website
• Client-server relationship
• What a domain name is, what an IP address is and why we have DNS
• What the web is
• The technologies most often used on the web: HTML (describing content), CSS (explaining our design and layout) and JavaScript (adding behaviour)
• A bit about what a browser is and what it does
• How a website is rendered in your browser
• The difference between semantics and visual appearance
• Accessibility and SEO basics
• How we break down a design into different kinds of code
• What the difference typically is with back and front-end development
• From that, the content can lean towards more of the how we construct designs, what responsive design is through to terms people might’ve heard internally like client-side or service-side rendering or around the design system we have.

Outcomes

The goal here isn’t that everyone leaves with a depth of knowledge of it all but hopefully it fills in a few gaps and gives a space where questions can be asked without judgement. All of these kinds of things help bridge disciplines and bring people closer together with greater shared understanding.

My hope is that we can use a similar format to talk about other aspects of what we do and keep exploring ways to better understand what we do, no matter our specialism. Perhaps ‘brand for non-designers’ or ‘research basics’ in future?

If you give this kind of thing a go, it’d be great to hear how you get on!