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I built a web site for a client, with the strict request that it must have a 'blog' section that he could update regularly himself.

Once it was live, I wrote a few blog posts for him - only short ones, but with photographs and diagrams relevant to his business. I stressed to him how each post looked - even from a distance and without reading the words. Formatted, no trailing single words, photos clipped and sized to fit the module width, and so on.

Then I set about training him how to achieve that. Firstly, using GIMP to clip/resize images. Then, how to use the CMS app I'd installed for him to insert the images and ensure they all looked the same way when published. I must have gone through it a dozen times over the next month or so.

Then came 'the words'. This is when - and I mean really when, and not that thing managers do just to be PITAs - you realise the gulf in how some people think and write compared to you. And how the whole concept of 'grammar' has apparently passed them by. Stuff like putting a space before and after a punctuation mark (if used at all), and using two linefeeds instead of one.

At the start, I'd told him that if he wanted to get and maintain a good position in the search engines, he ought to be writing regular posts with relevant content. Things people might be searching for that were related to his business. That kind of thing. I was thinking perhaps daily, or at least a couple of times a week.

For six months, I had to badger him monthly to write something. I proved to him that his posts were appearing in the search engines. Well, mine were, as were his once I'd edited them. And we continued with periodic re-training for editing/inserting images correctly and thinking about the paragraphs as well as the words (i.e. every bloody time he wrote something). I stressed that the more often he wrote, the better he'd be able to do it and the software would become easier, but month-long gaps were not helping.

After the last time, it suddenly hit me that it was his blog (and business), and not mine. He'd written a post and published it, but he hadn't inserted the images properly and they'd gone in as thumbnail sized. He hadn't formatted them, so they appeared inline as part of the paragraphs, creating huge gaps between them. I'd even told him before he published to send them to me and I'd clip them properly, but he didn't.

I didn't say anything, and I've not badgered him since. His last post - that one - was two months ago now. I mean, he must be able to see it doesn't look right just as well as I can.

But what can you do?