When I told people I was running a web design workshop, almost everyone asked the same thing: “Are you putting it online?”
It is a fair question. Online courses scale. You record it once, sell it indefinitely, and never have to worry about booking a room in Newmarket on a Saturday morning. The economics make obvious sense.
I decided not to do that, at least not for this.
Here is why.
What actually happens when someone gets stuck
I have taken a lot of online courses. The experience I have had — and that I hear from other people constantly — is that you follow along fine until you hit a problem. And then you are on your own. The instructor is not there. The forum might have an answer, or it might have 40 answers that contradict each other. You send a message and wait two days for a reply.
At that point, most people give up. They have already paid for the course, they are embarrassed to admit they are stuck, and the friction of finding help is high enough that it is easier to close the tab and move on.
Teaching someone a technical skill in person is fundamentally different because the moment they get stuck — and everyone gets stuck — they can just say so. I am in the room. I can see their screen. I can understand within about 30 seconds what the problem is and fix it. They keep moving.
That is not a minor detail. It is the difference between finishing the workshop with a live website and leaving with a half-built one you will never return to.
Why Newmarket and Aurora specifically
I am based in Newmarket. That is the main reason.
But there is also something specific about this area that makes it a good place for this kind of workshop. Newmarket and Aurora have a density of small businesses — trades, health and wellness practitioners, consultants, creatives, retail — that is high relative to the population. A lot of these businesses do not have a web presence that reflects what they actually offer. Some of them have no website at all.
I have talked to a carpet cleaner in Newmarket who has been in business for 12 years and still gets all his work from word of mouth, not because he wants it that way, but because he has no idea how to build a website and does not want to spend $5,000 to have someone else do it. I have talked to an Airbnb host in Aurora who knows her listing would get more bookings with a professional-looking direct booking site, but the Squarespace templates all look the same and she cannot figure out how to make hers look any different.
These are the people the workshop is for. And they are local to me, which means I can serve them in person.
What “in person” actually changes
Beyond the ability to help when someone is stuck, there is something harder to quantify that happens in a room.
When you are working on a problem in public — even a small group of 10 people — there is a social pressure that keeps you moving. You do not want to be the only person who has not built their homepage yet. You do not want to check your phone. You are there to do a thing, and the room makes it clear that is what you are doing.
I have seen this described as “activation energy.” Getting started on your website at home, on a Tuesday night after dinner, with Netflix on in the background and your phone on the table — that takes a lot of activation energy. Showing up somewhere on a Saturday morning, having paid for the experience, with a specific agenda and a facilitator — that activation energy is already provided for you.
This matters a lot for the kind of task a website build actually is. It is not hard. But it is unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things are easy to put off. Taking a morning in Newmarket to do it in a focused setting with support available is a much lower-resistance path than grinding through it alone.
The group dynamic
Something I did not anticipate when I started running these sessions: the participants help each other.
Not in a structured way — I am not assigning peer reviews or anything like that. But someone will figure out a good way to phrase a prompt for Claude and share it. Someone will ask a question that three other people also had but did not ask. Someone will make a design choice that another person likes and adopts.
This does not happen in an online course. It cannot. The async format means everyone is working in isolation, and even when there is a community forum, the spontaneous moment of “oh, you should try this” does not emerge naturally.
I keep the groups small — never more than 10 — specifically to preserve this. At 20 or 30 people, I cannot give real attention to anyone having trouble, and the group dynamic becomes less intimate and more like a lecture.
What about people outside Newmarket and Aurora?
The short answer: the workshop is accessible from most of the GTA.
Aurora and Newmarket are on the Barrie GO line. If you are coming from Toronto, Richmond Hill, or Barrie, you can get here by transit. If you are driving, parking is not hard.
I have had people come from Barrie, from Markham, from east Toronto. If the workshop is something you want to do, the logistics are manageable.
For people who genuinely cannot travel — because of accessibility needs, location, or schedule — I am thinking about what a remote version might look like. But it would be a live, interactive session, not a recorded course. The whole point is that I am there when you need help.
Who shows up
The attendees I have had so far are not who I expected.
I thought the typical attendee would be someone in their 20s or 30s who was comfortable with technology but had never learned to code. There have been a few of those.
But there have also been: a 58-year-old florist in Aurora who said she had been told for years that building a website was “too technical” for her. A general contractor in Newmarket who had a website built five years ago, hates it, and cannot afford to have it rebuilt. A yoga instructor who has been running her practice for eight years and still sends new clients to her Facebook page because her website is embarrassing.
The thing they have in common is not age or technical ability. It is that they have a real business that deserves a real web presence, and they have been blocked from getting one by a combination of cost, complexity, and the sense that it is something other people do.
The workshop is for them.
If this sounds like something that would be useful to you, join the waitlist for the next Zero to Live cohort. Sessions run in Newmarket and Aurora. The founding cohort rate is CA$597 and is limited to 10 people.
If you would rather read more first, the about page has more on who I am and why I run this, and the blog has more articles on building and improving small business websites.
I am a web designer and consultant based in Newmarket, Ontario. I build custom websites for small businesses across the GTA and run hands-on workshops teaching non-coders how to build their own sites with AI.
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