Some businesses begin with careful consideration, penetrating market research and a well-crafted business plan.
Train-ee started on a whim.
Well—less a whim than a spur of the moment decision to a answer a cry in the ExpressionEngine support forums for a complete step by step series of tutorials for an entire site implementation on ExpressionEngine.
I began that series on Boyink.com, and six months and 17 chapters later it was the most popular content I’d ever published on the web. Once done I began getting requests for compiling the series into a downloadable eBook and so I sat down one Saturday morning thinking I’d knock that out in a few hours. It ended up taking at least 60 hours to edit the formatting and round out the content to where I felt it was a presentable book. Between that time investment and the value I felt it had I decided that I should charge for it. Boyink.com was already sort of a mish-mash of business and personal content and I didn’t want to further confuse it, so a more targeted domain and site made sense.
And hence was born Train-ee.com.
So here’s the basic idea of Train-ee.com—I’ll develop resources that will help you learn ExpressionEngine. These resources will be in a variety of forms to accomodate different learning styles. I love EE as a product and always enjoy talking about it, demonstrating it, and helping people learn how to be productive and successful with it.
However - like all of you I need to make a living.
Developing high-quality content takes a lot of time—time that I could be spending doing ExpressionEngine projects for clients. In order for me to be confident that I can continue to create EE learning resources, Train-ee needs to provide a source of income. There are only two ways to do that - advertise, or charge for content.
I won’t promise the site will never have ads, but from a user experience and site design point of view I don’t like the idea of ads cluttering up the site. With this new design of Train-ee I’m hoping it can serve not only as a platform for teaching about EE, but also as an example of a well-implemented, nicely designed and attractive site based on EE. Advertisements just don’t fit into that vision.
So - while Train-ee will always have a large amount of free content, I also need to charge for some of it. So far this model has worked very well - and I’ve yet to have anyone, after making a purchase, contact me and say they weren’t happy with what they got for their money.
As a working web professional I understand the value of your time. My goal with all Train-ee content is to help you plan, produce and deliver an EE-based site in less time and with better results than you would have otherwise—thereby justfying your purchase here on the site.
