Web Design 101
- Toronto: Thursday, August 12
Kara McCain
Full-Day Tutorial
This full-day workshop covers the basics of designing websites that work with real users and their real needs,
and how to derive business value from better-designed sites.
This seminar:
- Explains what usability entails and how to ensure your audiences can use your content and tools
- Shows how to achieve business goals on the Web while avoiding common design and implementation pitfalls
- Illuminates the key differences between traditional and digital media, helping ensure your website or application will be successful
What You’ll Learn
This session will prepare you to move confidently to the Web, transitioning your skill set to Web design. It covers the basics of interaction and interface design for the online medium, incorporating usability, how to work with digital images and typography, and discusses tools used to move content online.
Course Outline
- Content on the screen: making it approachable and attractive
- Effective communication, now with efficiency!
- Guidelines for online typography plus emerging technologies that are making Web designers (almost) as happy as print designers
- Using images advantageously
- File optimization for the Web
- RGB vs. CMYK
- Screen resolutions
- Brand, personality, and voice
- Usable content and writing for the Web
- Making your website usable: what all designers need to know
- Who is using your site and what are they doing there?
- Information architecture basics – organizing your content
- How to make your material accessible to everyone
- Web standards and why they matter
- Common user behaviors and what to do about them
- Designing to fit within the larger online world
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and why you need it
- The search box: where it goes, why it’s important and current search trends
- Making PDF files into navigable pages
- Should you learn to code?
- Social media: whether, when and how to use it
- Music and video: using them appropriately and effectively
- Flash, CSS, Ruby on Rails, AJAX and other technologies: what they are and when to use them
- Going mobile
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises and plenty of inspiring examples deconstructed to show why they work and where they fail.
Handouts
Copies of all presentation slides.
Who Should Attend?
Anybody who is new to working on Web design projects, or will soon start working on Web projects.
New members of intranet design teams will also benefit. This seminar is about the user experience and does not cover
implementation techniques or HTML coding tricks.
Because of its broad coverage of the main topics of Web design, this course is aimed at all categories of team members,
including designers, usability specialists, content providers, business analysts, and project
managers who are taking their skill sets online, as well as marketers who are new to Internet
marketing. Even though the seminar doesn't cover programming, it's also useful for developers/engineers
who are moving into Web projects because developers need to understand the user interface requirements for what they're
building. The course is also highly relevant for executives who have Web design projects within their
organization.
This is an introductory course with no special prerequisites.
Instructor
Kara McCain is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. For more than 13 years,
she has been creating innovative brand and user experiences in the search, social media, luxury, hotel, travel,
jewelry, telecommunications, professional sports, e-commerce, government, and food-service industries. Her
expertise has allowed her to develop and implement highly successful Web and print design strategies for
Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Nielsen Norman Group, McCain was a senior visual and interaction designer
for Yahoo!'s Search and Social Media division, working on Yahoo! Answers, Local search, and defining the way
people integrate social media into search. Prior to Yahoo!, she also led the Web design effort for clients such
as Verizon, Pizza Hut, The Ritz-Carlton hotels, the Dallas Stars, Radio City Entertainment and the Zale Diamond
Corporation.
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