About The Seminar

The aim of this seminar is to provide the attendee with a holistic and practical view of website design, as seen from both the user and the search engine crawler side.

Some of the outcomes include:

• The attendees should be able to evaluate the website usability of a given website, while identifying and criticizing the important aspects of user centred design.
• The attendees should be able to evaluate the website visibility of a given website.

Target Audience

The target audience includes any person who has an interest in improving the usability, general functioning and the visibility to crawlers of a website. This could be webmasters, researchers and academics, CIOs, and those involved in Web-based promotional and outreach activities.

Who Can Attend?

The seminar is open to UKOLN members of staff. In addition a limited number of places are available to members of Web management teams, marketing staff and researchers at the University of Bath and other HEIs.

Abstract

The speaker will attempt to merge the (sometimes clashing) demands of website visibility with human usability and the logic flow of websites.

Through both theory sessions and short demos, the elements of websites contributing to the positive and negative sides of these three issues will be explored.

Practical application rather than Internet programming technologies will be covered. The emphasis will be on understanding and identifying the contributing factors in a given website, and on the evaluation of a website from these two perspectives.

Biographical Details

Melius Weideman is currently a Head of Department in the Faculty of Informatics and Design, Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town. After working in the electronics and computer industry, he joined the academe in 1984.

His research interests were initially focussed on computer viruses, but after 1994 the Internet, and specifically search engines started fascinating him.

He graduated with a Doctorate in Information Science from the University of Cape Town in 2001. Numerous of his publications have seen the light since the on topics including website visibility and usability, search engines and information retrieval. He published an academic book in 2009, titled: “Website Visibility: The theory and practice of improving rankings”.