Nov 9, 2010

Website Usability – The value of User Experience

Next week Karen Parkin, Britefire's director and a leader in online marketing development and practice, will be leading an invaluable course focused on Website Usability and creating compelling User Experience, This one day workshop to be held on 17 November at the City Lodge in Fourways, Johannesburg, is a must for anyone who makes business or marketing decisions about online initiatives, website conception and design, or has to interact with those who do.

Online use for all business, personal and household matters has made the internet an unavoidable tool to assist your clientele.  But how does your website measure up? Do you know how long your visitor spends on your site? Are you losing them before you knew they were there?  A beautiful looking website is not what is going to keep your potential customers coming back, a business needs to think of their website as an employee, in fact more than that, it is a tool that can offer all you have in-store and more, with more ease.

South Africa may be in the realm of faster, better, more bandwidth availability, allowing us to build on our content, but are our websites offering our visitor the ease of navigation they are looking for? Efficient web design and usability are essential practices entirely achievable without compromising the look and feel of your website and your online brand experience..

“We all know when something is not ‘user friendly’. Many of the interfaces we use daily, whether physical or electronic, suffer from poor usability. Some commonly despaired examples include signage at an airport or public places; the operation of remote controls for a TV/DVD; the SARS efiling system; and the generally confusing banking forms that require a proverbial PhD to complete! Bad usability is all around us, and bad usability simply means bad business. In this course we teach a customer centric approach to creating a website user experience that is pleasing, satisfying, and enables the person to achieve their task effectively. But even beyond that your user experiences need to be compelling and allow your customers to experience your brand. This requires a paradigm shift as we turn our thinking on its head and put the customer first. In this course we teach you how to approach Usability which will change the way you think!” says Karen Parkin, a digital strategist, e-marketer, corporate e-commerce expert and international internet business veteran, who has managed major award-winning web development projects for some of the world's largest corporations.

Britefire, a leading firm on online marketing strategy, development and training offers a range of other one day two day and SETA certified courses focused on all realms of e-marketing.

Contact Kim Visser, at Britefire for course information in both Johannesburg and Cape Town, on 021 790 0303, or kim.visser@britefire.com. www.britefire.com