I’m excited to finally be able to pull the sheet of Train-ee.com - a site where I intend to deliver eBooks, screencasts and other resources all designed with one thing in mind - to get the working web professional up to speed on ExpressionEngine as quickly as possible.

Why this, why now?

Simple - over the past 12-18 months I’ve seen a large increase in the number of contacts for ExpressionEngine work - not from end users, but from other developers and design firms.  The story is usually roughly the same - they have a project, EE looks like it’d be a great fit, but they don’t yet have the internal expertise to do the ExpressionEngine implementation.

While I certainly don’t mind hiring myself out as a subcontractor on those projects, it just seemed like there should be a better way to get the EE implementation knowledge out there that would help these firms help themselves.

Now - there are plenty of existing resources out there where you can learn about EE but I think what has been missing are some content types - books, screencasts, webinars, etc. that would appeal to people with different learning styles, and more of the step-by-step tutorial type content that’s been so popular here on Boyink.com

And yes - before you ask (or go peek, if you haven’t already), the content offered via Train-ee won’t (in most cases anyway) be free.  At least now, to start with, each item will be purchased on an individual basis with other pricing schemes being considered for the future. My hope is that, by charging a modest amount for each item, the site will generate enough revenue to justify continually adding new content while also ensuring that each item is of high quality and hence—a good value for your investment.

And please note - I fully expect that Train-ee.com is going to be an ongoing learning process on my part.  I’ve never ventured outside of the “work for hire” model of web development - so I hope you’ll understand if you see some pricing fluctuations or other site changes going on as I (hopefully) respond to market conditions and demands.

From a design point of view my goal was to get something workable and relatively consistent across different EE modules (wiki, discussion forum, member templates) as quickly as possible.  The best way to do that seemed to be to orient the site design towards existing themes for those elements, so the main site design is a mashup of the What’s your solution template available from solucija.com and some default EE elements.

The site uses the EE Simple Commerce Module to handle the transactions, and the EE discussion forum module for post-sale support.

So - what’s available for purchase on the site?  Read the next post…