Web Design for Optimization

In today's evolving digital landscape, the modern marketer plays a crucial role in shaping and maintaining a brands' online presence through the brands' website. Websites are trusted by consumers as a single access point for brands. The modern website acts as a hub connecting various business operations and digital marketing efforts. With increasing importance on the website, marketers along with web designers and developers need to ensure they are working together to prioritize the user experience when creating websites. Designing websites with the end user in mind ensures website development efforts are useful, cost effective, and backed by data-informed business decisions. Websites designed and optimized for the user lay the critical foundation for most other forms of digital marketing efforts, such as search engine marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. In this course students will be introduced to the key aspects of website design and development including strategy, scoping, planning, prototyping, developing, testing, and monitoring websites and website performance. Students will learn various optimization strategies, apply basic construction techniques, and will learn to analyze and assess existing websites considering user experience and optimization strategies critical to today's marketing efforts. As a final deliverable students will strategically plan, design, and develop a basic website. Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of both theoretical and practical aspects of website design and development.