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Your website is the face of your organization—but like any familiar face, you stop seeing it the way others see it. Maybe it's time to take a fresh look at your site to understand whether your audience and your staff members are getting what they need from it.
Over five sessions, Idealware will help you think through how to develop a more useful and engaging website. We’ll walk you through website basics, how to lead a redesign project, best practices for accessibility, mobile optimization, content management systems, technical details, and online branding. We’ll also talk about how website content works alongside email, direct mail, and social media efforts to create an organization’s communications mix.
During this course you’ll:
- Audit your site against a core set of questions.
- Define goals for how your website will serve your audience.
- Learn best practices for designing an accessible, usable, and polished website.
- Think through your content strategy and approach to your site’s design.
- Dig into website analytics and how you can use metrics to optimize the user experience for your site visitors.
- Review the technical side of developing and managing your website.
- Synthesize your research, ideas, and strategies into a vision that you can share across your organization.
- Create an action plan and prioritize the steps you will need to take.
Please note that participants will be given optional homework assignments each week. You can expect to spend 1-2 hours per assignment.
REGISTER NOW
Registration to be completed via Idealware’s website – use discount code 19-PA.
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Course Schedule
All sessions take place on Thursdays from 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM EST.
October 3: Starting the Audit Process
We'll kick off the course by helping you define your priorities and set goals. Then we'll cover how to lead a hands-on website audit while applying web design best practices. We'll also review strategies for user interviews and surveys so you can see through other people’s eyes what’s working on your website and what needs improvement. And then we’ll spend a substantial amount of time discussing how to synthesize your research, ideas, and strategies into a vision that you can share across your organization.
October 10: Defining Your Design and Content Strategy
A website needs content before it can be useful to your constituents. In this session, you'll learn how to define your content strategy, starting with your homepage. What content should be on it? Who will create it? What content matters most? The design of your site is just as important as the content. We'll talk about how to assess your graphic design and site navigation and walk you through, step by step, how to look at your own site with a critical eye. We’ll also introduce wireframing—a method for visualizing and organizing the structure of your website.
October 17: Fleshing Out an Accessible and Usable Website
In this session, we'll take a look at the goals and best practices behind core web pages. We’ll also cover website analytics to help you identify what’s working and what isn’t, search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that your site can be found on Google and other sites, and user testing. You’ll also receive a checklist for best practices for usability and accessibility.
October 24: Let’s Get Technical
With your strategy and goals defined, it's time to get under the hood. In this session, we'll cover the technical side of website design, starting with an overview of content management systems (CMSs), which make it easier for nontechnical staff members to create or update website content themselves. We’ll also talk about responsive design and other practices for building mobile-friendly websites. Finally, we'll end with a discussion on integrating your website with your database, online payment tool, and other systems.
October 31: Defining Your Priorities and Moving Forward
Now that your strategy is in place, and you have an understanding of the tools involved, it's time to put your plan into action. We'll start with an overview of the typical website development process, then talk through how to know whether you need a whole new site, or just an update to your existing one. If you just need to make updates, we’ll define a process to map out what updates should go in a first phase, and then what should come next. We’ll also talk through what you can do yourself and what tasks are best left to a consultant. By the end of this session, you’ll walk away with an action plan for “quick hits” and an outline for a more substantial project.
REGISTER NOW
Registration to be completed via Idealware’s website – use discount code 19-PA.
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About the Trainer
Kathleen Pequeno – Kathleen has been working with justice movements since the 1980s, often working at the point of intersection between storytelling and technology. She has volunteered, worked and consulted with well over a hundred organizations across the United states on issues including racial and gender justice, family violence, queer liberation, education justice, immigration justice, the overuse of prisons and jails, and economic justice for farmworkers. She has built (and rebuilt) scores of websites, CRMs and email systems as well as supported organizations with media planning and communications strategy. You can read her advice on social justice communications and technology at https://kathleenpequeno.com/.
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