Writing Web Content (Master Class)
Training
Provided by Online Training Directory
Write web content that persuades, informs, entertains, inspires, and sells.
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?ll learn a new approach to style, and, along the way, you?ll 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?ll write lots of short passages, review the prose on public sites, and evaluate how well these sites follow our guidelines. The instructor Anthony Agerskove will give you feedback and important insight on your work each week. At the end of the course, you take a final exam, rewriting several web pages. Recommended text: Hot Text: Web Writing that Works, by Jonathan and Lisa Price (New Riders, 2002), ISBN 0-7357-1151-8, USD $40. The author of the course textbook is Jonathan Price. Dr. Price earned his doctorate from Yale. Jonathan Price teaches web writing, information architecture, content management, and technical writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of New Mexico, the Society for Technical Communication, and many major corporations.
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Writing Web Content (Master Class)
Outcomes
By the end of the course, you`ll be able to
Assessment
Your progress will be assessed by:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Contact Hours: 30
By the end of the course, you`ll be able to
- Trim text for Web delivery.
- Make your page easy to scan.
- Create linktext that accurately predicts what the users will get if they click.
- Decide where to add links, and how to write them.
- Create paragraphs that work as discrete elements in an object-oriented world.
- Eliminate confusing material that makes visitors scratch their heads in confusion.
- Write headings that work well in menus.
- Organize menus so they make sense to your users.
Assessment
Your progress will be assessed by:
- Instructor evaluation of written work, following the detailed guidelines given in each module
- In-depth responses from the instructor on your individual questions
- Self evaluation, comparing your work on some challenges with the suggested solutions.
- Final exam
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
- 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
Contact Hours: 30
About The Training Provider: Online Training Directory
Online Training Directory - Workforce and Continuing Ed online courses are offered at basic, intermediate and advanced levels. Going beyond basic training provides a deeper and more educationally rewarding learning experience, especially for students who wish to advance careers or initiate new ones. For the general lifelong learner we continue to offer "fun to learn" single, stand-alone courses.
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