As digital skills grow in importance in newsrooms, trainers need to learn how to demonstrate features of web sites that illustrate skills their staffs should learn. Showing web sites live in workshops can be risky for a variety of reasons:

• Waiting for web sites to load and move can delay the workshop as you fill time, waiting for the site you just teed up to actually show on the screen.
• The best web sites are updated frequently, so you might click on the site and find that it has changed and the link you wanted to demonstrate isn’t where you thought it would be.
• Server problems follow Murphy’s Law, so you could get an error message when you try to connect at just the moment that a popular new feature has crashed the site you want to visit.

You can ensure that your staff gets the most of your web demonstration by using any or all of three preparation steps:

• Instead of demonstrating live on the web, use screen grabs (function-print screen on a PC, after you’ve used F11 to go full-screen), pasted (control-V) into PowerPoint slides. You can grab several screens from a single site, to show off successive links or things you might find by scrolling down.
• If a particular site merits a live demonstration, open the browser in advance and check out everything you want to show during the workshop, then leave the browser open but minimized. That way you won’t have to wait for any of the pages to load. And everything will be where you expect it to be. If you want to demonstrate more than one site, open and minimize multiple browsers so all the sites are open and your only delay is clicking from one browser to another.
• List the browsers on a handout, so staff members can explore them in greater depth later on their own. A digital handout, posted on your intranet, used on a CD handout or emailed to staff members, is most effective, so they can just click on the examples you showed them.