The basic unit of Web design is the page. Pages are the destinations users navigate to and where you put your content. When user expectations are met on destination pages, they are delighted and more likely to convert.

Ensure a good first impression by applying the 4 A’s to web page design: Attractiveness, approachability, attention, and action. In this course, you will learn the page design principles that influence the extent to which a website or intranet meets both its business objectives and user goals.

Please note: This course focuses on the user experience, not on development or programming.

Topics covered

• User approaches to Web pages
  • Scanning vs. thorough review
  • Eyetracking evidence of where people look
  • Scrolling and the page fold
• Guiding users’ attention
  • Visual design
  • Typography
• Learn the 4 A’s for evaluating and improving your Web pages
• Get insight on emerging design patterns that work and those that don’t work
• Navigation menus
  • Mega menus
  • Functional footers
  • Parallax scrolling
• Designing on a grid
  • Formatting and layout
  • Productive use of areas that generally attract less attention
• Reponsive design
• Integrating visual and multimedia elements
  • Images
  • Carousels
• Within-page updates
  • AJAX and related techniques for dynamic pages
• Using the right-hand side of the page to your advantage
• Advertising
• Design criteria for special-purpose pages
  • Homepages
  • Category pages and galleries, including visual overviews and textual listings
  • Product pages
  • SERP (search engine results page) listings
• Understand how page elements can influence user behavior and meet your business objectives

Format

The basis of the course is a lecture format with a couple of group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines.

The course also includes:

• Findings from our own usability studies
• Plenty of inspiring screenshots that we deconstruct to show why they work and where they fail
• Opportunities to ask questions and get answers