Put your digital content skills to the test – free online lessons
Content is crucial to the design of digital products and services. Yet we must keep in mind that when designing for the digital experience, information is consumed differently online compared to in print.
With Australians spending more than 10 hours a day on internet connected devices, presenting information clearly and accessibly online has never been more important.
Earlier this year we shared a writing for the web training deck that we used internally during a website refresh project. A few of you wrote to us asking if online training was available. The answer is yes!
The Department of Education has developed some interactive online training modules which they are kindly sharing with our digital.nsw community. The online training lessons are free, and each takes approximately 30 minutes to complete. Use Google Chrome web browser to access the lessons.
The training modules explore three key areas:
- Writing for the web
- Accessibility
- Search engine optimisation
Writing for the web
Lesson 1: Tips for web writing
This interactive lesson will help you reach your audience with tips on how to:
- Understand how people read online
- Focus on your audience
- Say it simply
- Get to the point
- Break up text
Accessibility
Lesson 1: Understanding accessibility
This lesson illustrates how different users experience content, with useful tips for making your content more inclusive.
Lesson 2: Elements of accessibility
This lesson looks at how to create, in an accessible way, the many different elements that make up online information, including:
- Text
- Structure
- Images
- Data tables
- Hyperlinks
Lesson 3: Checking and fixing accessibility
In this lesson, you’ll apply the guidelines learned in lessons 1 and 2 to assess your content’s accessibility.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Lesson 1: Understanding SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) applies techniques to make web content more visible in search engines. The higher your content features in search engine results, the more likely it is that people will look at your web pages and materials.