Writing for the Web 2
- Toronto: Tuesday, August 10
- San Francisco: Monday, October 4
- Edinburgh: Not offered
Janelle Estes
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
- Designing with personas
- Increasing your content's appeal
- 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
- International
- Addressing multiple audiences on the same site
- How to increase credibility on the Web
- How users learn to trust
- How to keep that trust through good content
- Presenting Corporate Information
- Company overviews
- Executive profiles
- Mission statements
- Press releases
- Financials
- Moving print to the Web
- What types of content repurpose well?
- How to use content across media types
- Writing for Small Spaces/Alternative Media
- RSS
- Blogs
- User reviews/testimonials
- Email newsletters
- 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.
Instructors
Janelle Estes is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Estes began her career as 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 B.S. in Information Design and Corporate Communication, and an M.S. in Human Factors in Information Design, both from Bentley College.
Presenting in Toronto.
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.
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