Writing for the Web 2
- New York: Tuesday, March 23
- Chicago: Saturday, April 24
- London: Friday, May 21
Hoa Loranger
Full-Day Tutorial
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.
What You’ll Learn
- The latest research on content usability
- How to leverage this information to bolster credibility
- How to capture and keep users’ attention
- How to target special audiences
Course Outline
- Writing for Your Target Audience
- Identifying goals for your content
- Developing personas
- Writing styles
- Use of tone
- Storytelling
- Structuring Content
- Content on homepages
- Deep link content
- Displaying large documents
- Page length and scrolling
- Tailoring to Special Audiences
- Kids and teens
- Seniors
- People who are blind or visually impaired
- International
- English as a Second Language
- Low literacy
- Addressing multiple audiences on the same site
- Presenting Corporate Information
- Company overviews
- Executive profiles
- Mission statements
- Press releases
- Financials
- Jobs/careers
- Writing for Small Spaces/Alternative Media
- RSS
- Podcasts
- Blogs
- Wikis
- User reviews
- Email newsletters
- Transactional email and confirmation messages
- Allocating content for different media
- Distributing content to outside platforms
- Instructional Content
- FAQs
- Help and instructions
- Error messages
- Online documentation
- Product descriptions and specifications
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.
Instructor
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.
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