Break Through the Administrative Barriers and Focus on Your Users

Tuesday August 18, 2009, 6-8:30PM (Food and networking at 6, Program at 7)

Southfield Public Library in Southfield, MI

Nick DeNardis, associate director of web communications at Wayne State University will discuss his approach for reviewing and creating usable web sites.

• A lot of people are involved with planning and constructing a single web site. How can you break through the administrative barrier and focus on your users?
• Become an authority as a web professional and fend off requests that don’t meet your users goals.
• Create a plan for testing and modifying the web site based on your users needs and how they actually use your site.
• I will focus on higher education where a lot of sites offer the same “product”. Identify strategies to stand out and care about your users.
• View your site from an outsiders perspective, does it pass the “ten second test”? Can you find the information you need?
• And last but not least, did you take enough time to care about users with special needs?

Nick is the Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University. As host of the video blog, EDU Checkup, he reviews higher education websites from the point of view of a first time visitor, while critiquing the design, information architecture and code of the sites.

He is a staff writer at .eduGuru, a higher education marketing and web development blog. He takes an active role in the higher education web community by sharing his thoughts and real world analysis in the Wayne State Web Communications Blog.

Nick is also an officer for Refresh Detroit, a group of web professionals whose goal is to promote web standards, usability, and accessibility and to spread the knowledge of web design in the Detroit and Ann Arbor Michigan areas.

Location

Southfield Public Library, “The Meeting Room”

26300 Evergreen Rd
Southfield, MI 48076 (map)
Website