Designing websites for business success

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 and 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!

What attendees have said:

'The information and perspectives presented are in my experience,simply not available elswhere, which seems incredible since such knowledge is so crucial to truly successful web development. The presentation of the course was brilliant - engaging, brilliantly insightful and clear.' V. Vukova

'For anyone involved in website design this is a must. It incorporates the Emarketing elements which should be the guiding element of the design.' V. Kotze

'New ideas - a lot of new insight - interesting - eye opening.' K. Baranska

Date: 10 March 2010
Venue: Pretoria
Cost: R 2600 incl VAT, incl lunch & refreshments (Group & Early Bird discounts apply)