Holistic Approach to "Web" Design
A talk given for the Naperville Library and SCORE
On Wednesday, May 13, I gave a talk for Naper Launch, an initiative of the Naperville Public Library to help entrepreneurs launch businesses, in honor of Small Business Week. Over 60 people attended the event - the most attendance of the series of talks given.
The thrust of my talk explains how "Web Design" is far more than making your own website look nice. It's about knowing where your audience might be, going there, and promoting yourself to them, in the hopes of bringing them back to your website to persuade them to buy your product or service or follow your cause. I then provide some real-world examples of how to do just that, including best of class website layout.
To create the visuals for the presentation, I used a cool tool that my business partner and fellow sprocketeer James Nagy turned me onto called Prezi. Instead of slides, prezi uses a giant canvas, and lets you put things wherever you want, then let's you put focus frames on the canvas where prezi zooms to. Prezi jumps from frame to frame and tells your story. Jim let me take it for a drive and I came up with this presentation. A fun ride.
Since I use my visuals to augment and illustrate what I'm saying, the visuals alone won't help most people, but prezi helps there too. It lets me add Voice-over to each of the frames. So I did.
Here is a re-creation of the presentation that I gave the Naper Launch crowd. It says "Naper Launch by James Nagy" since it's James' account so don't be confused. Just enjoy!
Please share this presentation with others who might be able to benefit from this advanced view of web design by clicking the Share buttons below. If you click the [LIKE] button, you'll be prompted to post a link on your own Facebook account. Similar things happen with the twitter and google+ buttons, and if you use other social media platforms they are likely hiding under the Share button so take a look.
And by all means use the link above and to the right to subscribe to our Sprocket Report, an every-other-weekly blog entry that's sent out via email (did you watch the presentation? we talk about how that works near the end of the presentation). Take a close look at the thumbnail of the newsletter. In the bottom-right, can you make out the face? It's Naperville Library's very own Kent Palmer, a frequent guest contributor!
Don Gingold
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Sprocket Websites, Inc.; Co-Founder Chicago Area DotNetNuke User Group
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