Designing Websites for Business Success
When and Where
Course Duration: 1 day (9:00 - 17:00)
Cape Town - 26 November 2010
Winchester Mansions Hotel, Sea Point
211 Beach Road
Sea Point, Cape Town
Tel: 021 434 2351
Johannesburg - 17 November 2010
Contact us for future dates.
Fourways City Lodge
Cnr Monte Casino Boulevard & Witkoppen Road
Fourways, Johannesburg
Tel:   +27 11 244 6000
Pretoria - Contact us for future dates.
Durban - Contact us for future dates.
Course Leader Your course leader is 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. Karen is an outstanding leader with an enviable depth of experience in Information Technology, advertising, new media, web development and e-commerce. Wherever she has worked, she has rapidly acquired a reputation for planning, execution, and delivery on complex high-pressure projects demanding sound business judgment, creative flair, and technical innovation.
Before returning to South Africa she led the global projects that took Marriott International from having a US-only website to its international presence in 20 countries and 9 languages. Marriott’s e-commerce operations now take over $17 million a day in online hotel reservations, for their 3,000 hotels around the world, and last year they were voted Best Hotel Website by Business Traveller magazine.
She has working on e-marketing projects for the past 10 years in large and small companies and agencies. Her web projects have been with organisations as diverse as Intel, Lockheed Martin, the BBC, and The Humane Society of the USA, and she has managed several award-winning websites in the US. She has in-depth experience of all aspects of online marketing in the hospitality industry. She has a great understanding of multicultural work environments and international markets and is a recognized guru in internationalisation and localisation. More about Karen
Why Designing Websites for Business Success?
Commercial websites are about business. They are not all about visual design and technical code. Websites exist for any number of business reasons: brand development, retailing, consumer community building, corporate lead gathering, customer service, and so on.
While programmers and designers play a vital role in site design, they need to work within a framework that has been carefully crafted by a person or team that has a business perspective, typically a marketing executive or business manager.
Britefire’s Designing Websites for Business Success is a workshop for the marketing person who has to play a leadership role in getting a site designed right. It is also for those designers and programmers who need to gain a better insight into the business aspects of web design and development.
This course teaches a 7-step structured approach to website development. It clarifies technical terms and concepts and provides powerful methodologies and guidelines for making sure that the site you build delivers on business objectives – while satisfying customer needs.
You’ll learn about user experience and user-centred design and what it means to deliver a compelling customer experience on your website. You’ll learn how to define – and communicate – your website vision and objectives, and how to translate them into a realistic development plan for that all your development team can buy into and build upon.
You will learn the principles of great web design, from the perspectives of visitor usability, visual appearance, site and content architecture, technical functionality, marketing purpose, and effective e-commerce.
The workshop explores the concepts of cross-media style and experience branding, examines how web 2.0 trends like consumer generated content and online social networks can be incorporated to maximum effect, and illustrates learning points with many examples both brilliant and bad.
You will learn how to research and define all of the requirements for your site, so development teams are always on the same page. You’ll also learn how to specify technical and creative design details of your site, the attributes of effective content and content management strategies, and you’ll learn the language and concepts that allow you to discuss these with designers, information architects, programmers, or IT people.
The course explores the issues, pros and cons of outsourcing aspects of your site’s design, from artwork and photography, to site templates, to content management, to hosting, transactions processing and maintenance, and it gives you a framework that helps make those decisions.
Lastly, you will learn how to go about testing your site’s design at key points in its development, and how to structure it so that it is easy to continue testing as new content, functionality, or objectives become incorporated.
The course is very pragmatic and down to earth, makes tons of practical recommendations and suggestions, and points you to sources and providers.
Why Should You Attend?
Britefire’s Designing Websites for Business Success course will not teach you to be an artist or a programmer, nor will it teach you how to use the software tools of those professions. But it will teach you how to architect a website that meets all of your business objectives, and how to communicate with the technical and creative teams who build it for you.
Well-illustrated insights into issues such as conversion funnels, search engine optimisation, web 2.0 and social media are woven into core topics and exercises in which you will apply what you are learning to your own website development projects. The course also examines examples of successes and failures, and provides proven best practices and lessons learned from sites in South Africa and abroad that have “got it” – and those who have not.
Who Should Attend?
This course is a must for anyone who makes tactical or strategic business or marketing decisions about online initiatives, or has to interact with those who do, including:
- business strategists
- marketing managers, product and brand managers
- new product development people
- advertising, marketing & PR agency executives
- website developers, information architects, and creative personnel
- e-commerce and e-marketing personnel
- customer service management
What Will You Learn?
You will leave this course not only with a great understanding of how to design effective websites, but also with a practical ability to lead your own website strategy and development projects.
What is more you will be equipped with an arsenal of best practices, inspiring and enlightening examples, and guidelines for staying in tune with developments in the future. You will learn:
- a 7-step structured approach to website design
- the technical terms and concepts of site development
- powerful methodologies and guidelines
- how to define your website vision and objectives
- how to create a realistic plan for site design
- the principles of great web design
- the concepts of cross-media style and experience branding
- how web 2.0 trends can be incorporated
- how to clearly define all of the requirements for your site
- how to specify technical and artistic details of your site
- the attributes of effective content and content management strategies
- how to discuss site design with designers, coders, or IT people
- the issues, pros and cons of outsourcing and how to select external vendors
- how to test your site’s design at key points in its development
- how to build a site that is search engine friendly
And you'll be totally psyched to take charge of your own online business initiatives!
Detailed Course Contents
What makes a site “well designed?”
- What problems do you solve?
- Conversion funnels: turning visitors into customers
- Matching functionality to visitor preferences
- What makes content dynamic & compelling
- Lessons from eye-tracking
- Visitor impatience and the 5 second test
- Search engine optimisation
- Designing for usability
Choosing a web site developer (build or buy?)
- 10 point checklist for selecting a developer
- How to work with your developer
Planning your website
- 12 requirements for an effective site
- Defining business & marketing objectives
- Branding and response
- Analysing competitors
- Learning from examples of good and bad sites
- 7 step methodology for site development
Discovery & Plan
- Defining the project scope and purpose
- Defining the business case / vision
- Defining target markets and personas
- Know your competitors
- Define project constraints
- Outsourcing and templates
- E-commerce options
- Software tools for management/collaboration
Define Requirements
- User Research and Usability Testing
- What is customer-centric design?
- How well designed sites are search engine friendly
- Designing for each phase of customer experience cycles
- Define creative briefs
- Style, structure and content
- Site flow and structure – Site Maps
- Page flow and structure – Wireframes and Use Cases
- Information architecture
- Defining your content strategy
- Developing functional requirements
- Blueprints for process flows
- Developing initial look & feel
- Creative mock-ups
- Standards and consistency
- Customer service
- Trust
- Maintainability
Specifications (Design & Technical)
- Design perspectives: look & functionality
- Developing content
- Writing for the web
- Developing images & designs
- Developing technical specifications
- Production – coding and hosting
- Code basics for non-programmers
- Graphic design guidelines & conventions
- Accessibility
- Designing for multiple target platforms
- Technical components and processes
- Developing a QA plan
Build
- Production Design
- Technical Build
Quality Assurance
Deployment
Analysis and Measurement
- Web traffic analysis
- Metrics for measuring effectiveness
Download Info Sheet
Download Info Sheet(PDF 85kB) for this course
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Fee
Fee: R2,600 incl VAT (includes lunch and refreshments)
Discounts:
Two people/Two Courses per booking: 5 % off both registrations
Early Bird Discount 5% for payment >1 month prior to course date.
Terms and Conditions (read full Terms and Conditions)
Participation in the course is subject to payment received prior to the course date.
In the event of a cancellation, for whatever reason, the following will apply:
- Reschedule Fee 7 days or less prior to course day - R500.00
- Cancellation 7 days prior to course day - Full payment will be due as a cancellation fee
- Cancellation 14 days prior to course day - 50% of payment will be due as a cancellation fee
Register For This Course
You can Register for this course in any of the below ways:
Fax: Print out this registration form (DOC 55kB) and fax it to us at 086 693 3575.
Phone: Call us on 021 790 0303 and we'll take your details.
Online: Select your desired course dates in the below box, hit the Register button and follow the simple process to register online in our secure environment.
E-mail: Send us an e-mail and we'll follow up with you.
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