Creating Web Content: an online course

A six-week course for designers, developers and pixel workers to learn about working with content as part of the design process, how to wrangle that content from clients, and what to do when faced with creating content themselves.

Is this course for me?

You may freelance or design/develop/manage a number of smaller sized projects or on a product that is not content focussed. Your content is not big enough to justify a full-time strategist yet but you are often left to make decisions about placeholder copy, interaction instructions, or designing without good knowledge of what is good practice for content.

What will you learn?

The course is still being prepared but a rough outline of the timetable is:

Week 1 Introduction to creating content, and using the 'C' word in front of other people.
Week 2 Doing the ground work: auditing, recognising good and bad content, and what to do with it.
Week 3 Looking at content on a micro level: messaging, microcopy, interaction copy, and page tables.
Week 4 Preparing for the future: style guides, editorial calendars and setting clients up for the future.
Week 5 Putting it altogether: creating a workflow and testing content.
Week 6 What next? Futureproofing your content process, updating your content.

There will be a weekly presentation, hand outs, a forum to keep up to date with classmates and ask questions of Relly, daily email prompts and guest expert contributors throughout the class. The material will remain available for access after the class ends and is fully downloadable throughout the class.

Outcomes

A workflow for creating content with others, including reasons on why this works better than providing boxes to use with colleagues and clients.

Confidence in creating content that works for the web - how best to get someone clicking that link, filling in their card details or correcting their mistakes - and as a design inspiration.

The course will be led by Supernice Studio's Relly Annett-Baker, a content strategist and speaker of some infamy and many tweets at @RellyAB.

Video transcript

Hello, my name is Relly Annett-Baker and I have been teaching workshops on creating web content for quite some years now. It's something I really enjoy and something I feel people get a lot out of, especially designers, developers and project managers who might not necessarily tasked with creating web content but often find themselves in the position of doing exactly that.

I do have a problem with workshops, though, and that is geography. I often have five or six people in one city who want to learn and five or six in another city who want to learn but no way of brining them together to create a good workshop size. So, I've been looking for a while for a format to get round this.

Just imagine. Can you possibly think of a format in which I could bring together people from around the world in a classroom to discuss topics and learn together without them having to physically be there? And then, of course, it hit me like a plank! I can do this online! I'm quite good at web stuff as it turns out.

And so, I am really excited to introduce you to this new concept. It's not a workshop and it's not a self-taught course. It's an online class. It will take place live, across six weeks. Each will there will be a new topic and I will have an audio/visual presentation for you and a handout with tasks for you to complete, related to that topic, so you can learn it throughly throughout that week and apply it to your own content. There will be a forum in which you can post questions and also compare with your fellow classmates how things are going, talk about any problems that you have and ask me questions directly so that the community as a whole can benefit. I'll also be getting contributions from other people as soon as I can pull them in to be involved.

So, I really want you to come, take part in this with me. I think it's going to be really exciting. So there is a box down here for you to put your email address in and then I can keep you up to date with all the things that are happening and let you know what's going on. I expect signups to happen in around two weeks from now and for the course to start for the first time at the end of May. It's going to be a learning experience for both of us and something I think will be really exciting and really help both you and me in the future. So sign up, put your email address in the box below, and let's get to know each other. Thanks. Bye!