The Audience Focused Optimization workshop is not your typical web design class - No traditional design elements are discussed or talked about unless students wish to discuss them. The focus of Audience Focused Optimization is providing you, the interactive marketer , with the tools necessary to get your biases out of your work so your audience shines through.

In this workshop you will learn to make your website significantly more effective using proven tools from:

• Cultural anthropology
• Learning and education theory
• Mathematics
• Cultural-knowledge modeling
• Myth and folklore
• Neurolinguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Psychodynamic and psychosocial modeling

Audience Focused Optimization is about:

1. learning and mastering your own internal design process
2. then using that understanding to modify your process at will
3. to create killer designs for website visitors (or your client's visitors)

• Recognize when to use traditional versus non-traditional website design processes
• Recognize your own design process and how and when it works best
• Be creative on demand
• Listen to your internal customers' thoughts and ideas effectively
• Recognize your audience even when your internal customers can't
• Break down the design process into it's basic parts - internal and external - and make them work together to create award winning, business driving web designs and concepts

In this one day workshop, you will learn how to:

• Know thy web visitor
• Design for a specific result from a specific audience
• Explain your design process and defend your design decisions
• Recognize what your internal customer will and won't do
• Understand and work with internal customer motivations and goals
• Understand and work with website visitor motivations and goals
• Help internal customers come up with working strategies for achieving their goals

• Time - The one day training covers slightly more than 8 hours from beginning to end, starting at 9am and going until 5pm (including breaks) each day. It is strongly recommended that participants have a light breakfast before class starts and wear loose fitting clothes. Lunch and snacks are provided.
• Location - This class can be conducted at a host company's facilities or at a NextStage certified training facility (usually a woodland inn). Cell phones, pagers, etc., must be turned off during the class.
• Class Size - 10-30 students
• Certification - This training is given without grading of any kind, including Pass/Fail. Participants will be given a Certification of Training (time in class) only, not a certification of ability.
• Training Materials - NextStage provides the training materials for all of its classes and trainings.

• Learn to gather information about audiences
• Learn key ways to create market material that meets client goals and works
• Learn how to avoid and how to use meaningful noise
• Keep people's attention where you want it
• Recognize when being creative isn't being creative
• How to remove yourself from the design process
• How and when to ask "Why?"
• How to practice these methods outside of class

1. Greeting and open discussion of class goals
2. Team Building Exercises
3. Break
4. Introspection and Extrospection - Exercise
5. Creativity Express - Exercise
6. Learning How People Eat
7. Lunch
8. PsychoSocial Realignment
9. Eye on the Ball - Exercise
10. Rock, Paper, Magnum - Exercise
11. Break
12. Logical Process and Ontological Process - Exercise
13. Audience Centered Design - Exercise
14. End of Day Discussion and Cool Down
15. Homework Assignments

• Onsite
  1. US$1,295/student (minimum 10 students)
  2. Faculty travel and expenses extra
  3. US$2,500 non-refundable fee due upon registration
• At NextStage Training Facilities
  1. US$1,395/student
  2. Student travel and expenses to Nova Scotia training facility extra
  3. US$700 non-refundable fee due upon registration