Web Spinning web design management seminar
My professional status: independent web designer/developer
Client: Modus Seminars
Dates: March - December 2000
Brief: to develop and update an existing half-day training seminar aimed at marketing and communications managers, and teach an ongoing series of these seminars bi-monthly in Wellington, Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne. The seminar partnered the Case Studies workshop.
My responsibilities included:
- Development of the existing seminar content, which taught an understanding of the website design process. It was aimed at employees responsible for their company's website development
- Development and authoring (in Freehand and PageMaker) of the workbook which would be used during the seminar and kept as a reference
- Development and authoring (in Freehand) of the PDF slide presentation accompanying the seminar
- Setting up and organising the seminar in each location
- Teaching the seminar
- Follow-up work.
I worked on this project with Ben McFadgen, partner in our company, SpaceCraft. The development of an existing seminar allowed us to update the content and to streamline the teaching process in order to clarify it.
Interestingly, as well as marketing and communications people, I also found myself training start-up web design firms. It appeared that many new web design companies were unsure of the best way to manage the process themselves, and so they came to my seminars to find out!
Travelling and teaching all day for four days straight was exhausting but very rewarding - I love designing websites, I'm a good teacher, and so my students came away with a good understanding of the subject.
In July 2000 I was asked to adapt our existing Web Design Management and Case Studies seminars and teach them in Sydney and Melbourne for 60 members of the same company, TMP Worldwide - an organisation moving from print recruitment advertising into web-based recruitment.
The additional work included:
- Adapting both seminars to the specific needs of TMP Worldwide
- Rewriting both booklets and both sets of seminar slideshows.
This job came about because two employees of TMP attended my very first seminar in Melbourne. They recommended it to their Sydney representative, who then attended - and convinced his boss to pay for 60 more employees to attend the tailor-made series a month later.