Certificate in Web Content Creation Master Classes
Web Pages and Design
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| The certificate program consists of three Master Classes: (1) Writing Web Content (2) Architecting Web Content (3) Creating Popular Web Genres
Then you値l learn how to think structurally when approaching new content, exploring information architecture from the point of view of a creator. You値l see how to produce text that fits snugly into a content management system.
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By the end of the first workshop, Writing Web Content, you値l be able to
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Your progress will be assessed by:
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Is your style electronic? Learn how to make your Web text easy to navigate, easy to understand, and easy to use. This workshop shows how moving text from paper to the screen, or from a conventional Help system to Web customer assistance, demands a new approach.
Learn to write the Web way, responding to your visitors with all the give-and-take of a conversation, replying to their questions, addressing their needs, and assuaging their doubts. When you write hot text, you get your point across quickly, provoke action, and satisfy your toughest audience--your customers.
Based on extensive research in usability, readability, and attention, and supported by advice from experienced professionals, this course will help you get your prose in shape for Web success.
If you are already writing content for the Web, you will get immediate help with common challenges. If you are thinking about writing for the Web, you値l learn a new approach to style, and, along the way, you値l create good samples for a portfolio, for job hunting.
With each module, you get detailed guidelines. Each guideline comes with specific tactics to adopt when writing, background on "the reason why," before-and-after examples, advice on how the guideline should be adapted for particular audiences, challenges, and answers. You値l write lots of short passages, review the prose on public sites, and evaluate how well these sites follow our guidelines. I give you feedback on your work each week. At the end of the course, you take a final exam, rewriting several web pages.
Agenda for the first week of this workshop:
- Achieving brevity.
- Cutting text that was originally written for paper.
- Shortening your paragraphs, sentences, and phrases.
- Deleting fluff.
- Moving tangential materials into linked pages.
- Making text scannable.
- Making titles and headings meaningful for the user.
- Highlighting important terms in your text.
- Writing the text that your users will click.
- Making clear what people will get if they click.
- Making the link the emphatic element.
- Providing depth and breadth through plentiful links.
- Establishing credibility through outbound links.
- Making links accessible for people with special needs.
- Designing paragraphs as individual objects.
- Unifying a paragraph around a central idea.
- Where to put the main point.
- What to do with context.
- Reducing cognitive burdens on your visitors.
- Limiting the number of clauses per sentence.
- Blowing up noun trains.
- Avoiding ambiguities, passives, and negatives.
- When to scroll, and when not to.
- Writing menus that make sense to your users.
- Creating headings that also work as menu items.
- Offering multiple routes to the same information.
- Displaying several levels at once.
- Confirming that the users have arrived on target.
- Final exam.
On the web, structure matters more than style. You have to follow standard patterns, sometimes even filling in forms in a database, rather than writing with sprawl and luxurious detours. You need to understand the world of structured information and content management, so you can create informative, persuasive, even entertaining text.
Learn how to create an architecture of informative objects, rather than a site full of individual documents. This non-technical introduction to information architecture takes a creator痴 point of view, so if you write, edit, or work within a content management team, you will find this workshop helps you recognize patterns in your content, and formalize those structures as hierarchies of objects, so that you can get the full benefits of content management.
When you say goodbye to documents, and hello to objects, you give your web visitors the ability to interact with even the smallest chunk of your material. Your customers become more efficient in browsing, searching, and scanning a page. And you can offer them content customized for their group痴 interests, jobs, or products. You can even provide true personalization, serving up content that is relevant to each individual, filtering out what is not. And because you are updating objects, rather than revising an entire document, you can make more of your content up to date.
In this workshop, then, you値l learn how to create consistent structures for your content so that users can find exactly what they want, learn quickly, and act efficiently--buying, voting, learning, or entering a conversation with your team. You値l learn how to define a new informative object, or pattern, and how to lead your team through the process of converting from a document orientation to the wonderful world of objects.
This course is aimed at non-programmers, but many programmers have found it a useful introduction to the idea of information architecture. I take the point of view of content creators, and show you how to organize your information in a way that makes sense to your users, and helps them achieve their goals. So you値l come to understand the underlying role of XML (without actually writing any tags) and the importance of object-orientation (without writing any code).
Each week, you will receive course materials from me. You can email me questions, stray thoughts, or concerns at any time, and I will get back to you as quickly as I can. When you have read the material and done the challenges, you send those to me by email. You will usually get my comments back within 24 hours, along with materials for the next module. The course is designed to help you become a professional, so I invite you to ask any questions that occur to you, along the way.
Agenda for the first week of the workshop on Architecting Web Content:
- Overview of information architecture
- Problems with Web publishing
- The benefits of an object-oriented approach to content
- Describing structure formally with markup languages
- Arranging menus as objects in space
- Making your structure browsable
- Using card sorts to determine the users'' conceptual model
- Getting your pages found by search engines
- Personalizing via objects
- Patterns: Reference
- Organizing reference objects in nested structures
- Prioritizing objects that provide answers
- Patterns: Enabling actions
- The components of a good procedure
- Working from a process to a set of procedures
- Articulating concepts
- Standardizing content structures, or patterns
- Leading your team in developing an information architecture
- Workflow, guidelines, and deliverables
- Final exam on architecting web content
Now that you have learned to write in a web style, and to identify the function of each element in the standard structures you are working in, you are ready to try your hand at some of the most popular types of writing on the Web. This final class in the certificate program leads to a professional portfolio you can show to future employers and clients.
Learn to write and edit some of the most popular genres on the web. Become a versatile Web writer or editor, able to handle whatever your boss throws at you. Develop a deep portfolio to show future employers and clients
You値l see how each genre has evolved as a virtual conversation between thousands of users, and thousands of writers, over time. Each element in the standard structure responds to a particular type of question asked by a lot of users. When you understand the give-and-take of this exchange, you can write the individual components much more easily. For each genre, then, we focus on what your users want, and what standard elements you need to write or edit, to respond.
You値l also learn how to tune your style for particular audiences. Some want extremely personal rants; others talk like Sergeant Friday, saying they just want the facts, M誕m. As you adjust your tone for different groups, and different purposes, you became a more flexible, and accomplished web writer.
And you値l learn to write web content that works--persuasive marketing copy, press releases that get picked up by journalists, FAQs that help users navigate your site, news stories that provoke discussion, successful e-mail newsletters, entertaining webzine articles, a Weblog giving your personal vision to the world, and an electronic version of your resume.
Each week, you will receive course materials from me, with guidelines, tips, and challenges, and you will read a chapter in our book, Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. You can email me questions, stray thoughts, or concerns at any time, and I will get back to you as quickly as I can. When you have read the material and done the challenges, you send those to me by email. You will usually get my comments back within 24 hours, along with materials for the next module. The course is designed to help you become a professional, so I invite you to ask any questions that occur to you, along the way.
Agenda for the first week of Creating Popular Web Content:
- Getting and giving attention on the web.
- Writing marketing copy that works on the Web
- The components of a good product description
- Structuring news releases so journalists will really use them
- Creating FAQs that really answer your users questions
- Embedding assistance-labels, tips, and clues
- Creating help pages
- Wrestling with your privacy policy
- Responding to customer email
- Creating news articles that work on the Web.
- Writing an e-mail newsletter.
- Making your own Web log (blog)
- Webzine articles that provoke discussion
- Pitching a webzine editor
- Creating an e-mail resume
- Creating a Web resume
- Reviewing your work
- Creating a web portfolio of samples, demonstrating that you know how to create a menu system, with a well-structured set of well-written web pages, to show off your skills in creating web content.
Contact Hours: 90
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