Writing for the Web 2: Presenting Compelling Content
- Las Vegas: Tuesday, March 13
- San Francisco: Saturday, April 7
- Amsterdam: Friday, April 27
- Washington D.C.: Friday, May 18
Marieke McCloskey
Hoa Loranger
Janelle Estes
Full-Day Training Course
Does your writing sell? How persuasive are you?
The Web is a large place. Attracting and retaining people’s attention is more difficult than
ever before. It’s not good enough to have a passable website, it must shine. This course will give
you practical techniques on how to capture your audience’s attention by using one of most
powerful tools online — words.
Course Outline
- Voice, tone, and style
- Defining your voice
- Formal vs. informal writing styles
- Storytelling
- Addressing multiple audiences on the same site
- Customer care and credibility
- How users learn to trust
- How to keep that trust through good content
- Presenting corporate information
- Building relationships through customer care content
- Homepage
- How to encourage links
- Creating a homepage that has value
- Trends: dos and don'ts
- Landing pages
- How to increase conversion
- Understanding the user's decision process
- Common pitfalls
- Structuring complex content
- Presenting detailed content
- Displaying large documents
- Strategies for layering content
- Page length and scrolling
- Alternative ways to present information
- Information graphics
- Images and captions
- Videos and slideshows
- FAQ
- Social media
- Facebook and Twitter
- Blogs
- User reviews/testimonials
Format
Full-day tutorial includes: lecture, video highlights from usability and eyetracking studies, exercises, and discussions. Real-world examples are used to illustrate points throughout the day.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides.
Who Should Attend
If you communicate on the Web, this course is for you; Web designers, intranet contributors, online and technical writers and editors, usability engineers, sales and marketing professionals, and managers of these functions. Although there are no prerequisites, a general knowledge of Web usability issues and some general experience with writing are useful.
Related
This course is a companion course to Writing for the Web 1. To learn the topic in depth, we recommend that you attend both days, but each is structured to offer a complete single-day experience. If you need only the basics, attend the first day, or for advanced material, choose the second.
Instructors
Marieke McCloskey is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.
She works with clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials about user
experience, usability research methods, writing for the Web, Intranet design, and the
psychology of users. McCloskey has conducted usability studies, including eyetracking,
in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
She has been a researcher and co-author of several NN/g reports, including
College Students on the Web and
Intranet Usability Guidelines
Before joining NN/g, McCloskey was an Information Architect in the Digital Media Group at the
National Football League, where she worked on several large-scale website redesign projects.
She has also worked as a psychometrician at Massachusetts General Hospital. McCloskey holds an
M.A. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University, where she explored the use of
neuroimaging to study human behavior and cognition, and a B.S. from University College
Utrecht, in The Netherlands. McCloskey is based in Los Angeles, California.
Presenting in Las Vegas.
Hoa Loranger is a Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office. Loranger has
consulted with many large, well-known companies in such areas as finance, customer support, intranets,
e-commerce, entertainment, and technology. She has conducted international usability research worldwide and has given
keynote presentations and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including user testing, paper prototyping, and fundamentals
of Web usability. She coauthored the book Prioritizing Web Usability
(New Riders Press) and has written reports on design for Flash-based
applications, investor relations,
“about us” pages,
B2B websites,
location finders, and
teens.
Before joining NN/g, she served as human factors lead for Intuit’s Consumer Tax and Small Business Division,
where her group was responsible for user-interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW
(now part of Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational
applications and computer configurations in military vehicles. Loranger earned an M.A. in human factors and applied
experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Irvine.
Presenting in San Francisco.
Janelle Estes is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.
She works with clients in a variety of industries and presents regularly about usability methods, email newsletters,
writing for the Web, and the user experience of nonprofit websites. She has been the primary researcher on and
co-author of several NN/g reports, including email newsletters, transactional email messages, donation usability
for non-profit and charity websites, and social media. Prior to joining NN/g, Estes was a research associate on
the Customer Experience team at Forrester Research, where she was involved with many research efforts related to
user experience and user centered design. Additionally, Estes has worked as a user experience consultant with
companies across many industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and
telecommunications. Most recently, Estes worked at Chordiant Software as a Human Factors Engineer in an agile
development environment. Estes holds a BS in Information Design and Corporate Communication, and an MS in Human
Factors in Information Design, both from Bentley University.
Presenting in Amsterdam and Washington D.C..
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