There are many other resources available to get answers to your digital tools questions, all of which are either free or very low cost. The Internet, friends, knowledgeable co-workers, librarians, tutorials: all are readily available. What those resources offer is their view of how things work, what you could do, what they imagine are workarounds to your problem. They are frequently not available, or willing, to spend the time to listen carefully to what you want, or think you want, and then offer solutions that are tailored to your situation, knowledge level, curiosity, time frame. JoeBay U's goal is to ensure you don't need to ask the same question again because you never really understood the answer in the first place.

In theory, yes, you might get your question answered, and depending on the question, and the company you call, it might not cost you money. However, it is extremely probable that it will cost you time: time to find who it is that you should call about what you want to ask (the computer company, the printer company, the camera company?), time to wait wait wait on hold listening to music that obliterates your mind, time to wander through the maze of voice mail prompts, time to repeat the question because you either got the wrong person or they don't understand the question or you cannot understand their answer because either their accent is hard to decipher or because you do not understand the terms they are using, time to try whatever they think is a solution (which could well involve restarting your computer which takes several minutes), etc.

Often you may have to pay for the phone call and many tech support companies require your credit card before they will begin to talk to you.

The photo was taken in the country that provides a growing proportion of technical support for U.S. technology companies, India.

The World Wide Web (as in "www.yourbusinessname.com") was originally created with a language that is spoken by your web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.). The language is called "Hyper Text Markup Language", abbreviated "html" ("html" is actually a subset of "SGML", which for the real curious among you stands for "Standard Generalized Markup Language" and is something you are not likely to even imagine learning about). As with many things computer, html began with version 1. It is now up to version 5, and has been supplemented by other web browser languages. Like all good languages, even as it evolves it doesn't lose its memory of the old days, so any web page written in earlier versions of html (like the Garden House web page) work fine even if they are, to the computer, staggeringly out of date. They need not be out of date as far as the viewer is concerned; how effective the web page is in telling your story is not about the version of html (or the web design tool used to generate the web page) but rather entirely up to the web page designer.

More and more people are using smaller and smaller computers. The small computers (laptops and notebooks) are less expensive, portable, and connect to the internet in more and more places (wi-fi hot spots). Prior to this emerging trend, your information was routinely stored on a hard drive on your computer. Now, the big guns (yahoo, microsoft, google, apple, etc.) are creating internet-based resources where you can develop and store your information on their computers, often for free or for a nominal fee. Someone else's computer "out there" is described as a "cloud". Your information is created and stored in the "cloud", which makes it safe and accessible from any device (the library's computer, your friend's computer, the office computer, your smart phone, etc.) no matter where you are. It is available 24/7 anywhere via any device. If your laptop is stolen, lost, broken, you have not lost your information. The only thing you need is an internet connection, which is now becoming available almost anywhere in the world any time of the day, and largely wirelessly (so you don't need to hook up to some cable some where—just turn on your device and voilá, you're "on").

One of the powerful advantages of cloud computing is that most activities that you might want to do are available in/on the cloud for free. Google is probably king of the hill here. For nothing you can create documents, spreadsheets, web pages, maps, send and receive emails, get news, create a calendar, park and show your photos, and much much more. If you use a library computer, you don't need a computer or to pay for an ISP. You could create a whole business with zero dollar cost in digital tools. If you spring for a notebook or inexpensive laptop ($300 or less) you can hitch off of the library's wi-fi, or Enzo's, or Erb's, or whomever's, for zip, 24/7. 

Prices are directly related to the breadth and depth of knowledge needed for different courses. There is a difference in cost between a hamburger and a steak, between the knowledge required to pump gas and rebuild the engine, between what it takes to pilot a paper plane and a 767.