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Website Usability By Design - A 1-Day Course

Synopsis

This is a short course teaching website usability through the application of engineering principles to web site design. Its primary objective is enable organisations to formulate and implement a web site strategy which will raise their website's productivity well above the norm.

This web site usability training course is inspired by, and organised around a critical reading of Jakob Nielson's book, Designing Web Usability, New Riders, 2000.

The course is, however, written and delivered by a team of experienced web site design professionals, with their own perspectives on technical good practice and commercial feasibility.

Suitable for

  • Web site design professionals who want attract more visitors to their web site and convert a higher proportion of those visitors into paying customers.
  • Technical managers and commercial directors who want to know why their web site is under-performing and how to dramatically raise its return on investment, through the pragmatic application of web usability techniques.
  • Web site content providers and editors who want to build usability methods into their everyday practice.

Delivery

This usability seminar is, like all of our web site design training, an instructor-led course which can be delivered for in-house company groups or for individuals on public courses.

Unlike our purely technical web site design courses, its emphasis is on discovery, discussion and evaluation of the technologies and concepts involved rather than on practical/craft skills.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Central London — £375 (+VAT)

  • 19 May 2008
  • 21 Jul 2008
  • 22 Sep 2008
  • 24 Nov 2008

Contents:

Introduction to web site usability

  • Pragmatism and methodology
  • Art versus engineering
  • Why everyone gets web site design wrong the first time

Page design issues in web usability

  • Screen space: the scarcest resource
  • User controlled presentation
  • Screen resolution
  • Standard and non-standard content
  • Application versions
  • Data lifetimes
  • Response times
  • Connections and partial downloads
  • Link descriptions
  • Link titles
  • Link colours
  • Link consistency and site structure
  • Link expectations
  • Outbound links
  • Inbound links
  • Linking to subscriptions and registrations
  • Linking from adverts
  • Stylesheets for consistency
  • Stylesheets for separating content from presentation
  • Fonts and font sizes
  • Text size
  • Frames: just say no
  • Frames: more reasons to say no
  • If you must use frames
  • Printing issues

Content issues in web site usability

  • Content is critical and web content is different
  • The value of an editor
  • Discursive style
  • Keeping texts short
  • Checking and copy editing
  • Scannability
  • Plain English
  • Managing long texts by chunking
  • Page titles
  • Headings, sub-headings, and pull quotes
  • Legibility
  • Understanding image formats
  • Reducing image file sizes
  • Multimedia and plugins
  • Animation
  • Animation pitfalls
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Downloading and streaming
  • 3D
  • Conclusion: the attention economy

Navigation and searching in web site usability

  • From page design to site design
  • Homepages are over-estimated
  • Splash screens — just say no
  • Navigation: the three big questions
  • Where am I?
  • Where have I been?
  • Where can I go?
  • Creating and revealing site structure
  • Reducing navigational clutter
  • Managing subsites or sections
  • Search-dominant versus link-dominant users
  • Implementing searching
  • Presenting search results
  • Search term usage
  • Search destination design
  • Presenting URLs and domain names
  • Archival and old URLs
  • Executable links and URLs

Web usability testing

  • Statistics and methods
  • Whom to test
  • When and where to test
  • The test cycle
  • Conducting a test
  • Observing a test
  • Interpreting and using results
  • Using results

Intranets, accessibility, internationalisation and usability

  • Extranets
  • Intranets
  • Accessibility
  • Visual disabilities
  • Auditory and speech disabilities
  • Motor and cognitive disabilities
  • Internationalisation and cultural difference

Web Usability training UK enquiries

UK Training enquiries and feedback form.

Web Usability training UK prices

For publicly scheduled training (individual places), see our UK training schedule.

In-house training for company groups is charged at a daily rate per group — see our In-House UK Training Guidelines.

Publicly Scheduled Training Locations

We currently run public training courses in the following locations:

  • London, UK
  • Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
  • Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
  • Carshalton, Surrey, UK
  • Chester, North West, UK
  • Coventry, West Midlands, UK
  • Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
  • Glasgow, Scotland, UK
  • Harwell, Oxfordshire, UK
  • Manchester, North West, UK
  • Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, UK
  • Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK
  • Reading, Berkshire, UK
  • Slough, Berkshire, UK
  • Stevenage, Hertfordshire, UK
  • Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK
  • Wokingham, Berkshire, UK

Most UK public training courses are available on a monthly basis.

Please see the individual course outlines or our public training schedule for details.

In-house (on-site) training locations

We deliver in-house courses at client premises and/or training facilities in any part of the world which is practically and commercially accessible.

Our In-house training guidelines outline our basic requirements and our UK pricing structure. To estimate costs for training in other countries, simply convert to your local currency and then make a rough calculation of our tutor's costs for travelling to and staying at your location.

Web Standards Compliance

A good way of assessing the quality of website design training, is to find out whether or not the training company's own web site complies with web standards. Ours does.

Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!

Every website which adheres to these W3C standards makes the web a little more useful and a little easier to use. Conversely, every site which breaks them not only irritates potential customers, but also undermines the interoperability upon which the basic functions of the web depend.

If you ever find a non-compliant page on our site, please let us know. It's most likely to be the result of a momentary lapse in concentration (e.g. markup typos) and will be fixed immediately.


West Yorkshire Office

GBdirect Ltd
Training Division
Bradford Design Exchange
34 Peckover Street
BRADFORD
BD1 5BD
West Yorkshire
United Kingdom

training@gbdirect.co.uk

Training: 0800 651 0338
General: +44 (0)870 200 7273
Finance: +44 (0)1353 615 174

Please call between 0900 and 1700 (UK time) on Monday to Friday


South East Regional Office

GBdirect Ltd
Training Division
18 Lynn Rd
ELY
CB6 1DA
Cambridgeshire
United Kingdom

training@gbdirect.co.uk

Training: 0800 651 0338
General: +44 (0)870 200 7273
Finance: +44 (0)1353 615 174

Please call between 0900 and 1700 (UK time) on Monday to Friday


Please note:
Non-training enquiries should be directed, initially, to our UK national office in Bradford (West Yorkshire), even if the enquiry concerns services delivered in London or South/East England. Clients in London and the South East will typically be handled by staff working in the London or Cambridge areas.