Writing for the Web 1: Foundations of Web Content
- Las Vegas: Monday, March 12
- San Francisco: Friday, April 6
- Amsterdam: Thursday, April 26
- Washington D.C.: Thursday, May 17
Marieke McCloskey
Janelle Estes
Full-Day Training Course
What’s in a word? Users approach online information differently than information contained in print media.
Learn how to capitalize on this difference with some simple but powerful rules. Our research shows that rewriting
text according to our “Writing for the Web” guidelines often doubles the usability of a website or intranet,
and drastically increases the success rate for effectively communicating key messages.
Attend this tutorial to discover how your choice of words influences the ways users navigate to — and
around — your site. Learn to use words online to entice and educate users, and to more effectively convert
them into repeat customers.
Course Outline
- Reading and scanning behaviors
- Reading in the real world
- Reading online
- Findings from our eyetracking studies
- Writing for your readers
- Understanding your audience and using personas
- Identifying goals for your content
- Reading levels and low-literacy users
- Creating accessible content
- Rules for Web writing
- Guidelines for effective communication
- Writing for fast comprehension
- Content chunks
- Writing for people and search engines
- Optimizing page content
- Page titles
- Headings and subheadings
- Summary text
- Body text
- Lists
- Links
- Callouts
- Dealing with organizational politics
- Integrating content strategy into a development process
- Repurposing print documents for the Web
- Creating a style guide
- Justifying the re-write
- Testing your content
Format
Full-day tutorial encompassing lectures, video highlights from user testing and eyetracking,
and exercises. Real-world examples are used to highlight points throughout the day.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This session is intended for anybody who communicates online; 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.
The course will, however, cover some basics before delving into more complex issues.
Related
This course is a companion course to Writing for the Web 2. 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 and 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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