Skills Week: Creating a website after a week-long course
With just the basics of coding and C+ Programme, I didn’t start out very confident, however, CareerContact’s Digital Skills Week provided me with a platform to develop skills and create wonderful memories!
The CareerContact Pilot Programme was conducted over seven weeks in November and December 2020. In the first week, students were exposed to User Experience Research (UX), User Interface Design (UI), Low/No-code web development and Digital Marketing; with one topic covered each day. Every day involved blended learning — students completed an online task before taking a deeper dive into the topic with an industry mentor.
I can still remember how nervous I was on 17th November 2020 when I first embarked on this journey. Now, I am prepared and confident that I can handle the challenges of SMEs in Singapore better and produce a product that will be effective for use in their business.
Why was this Digital Skills Week better than any other webinars I have attended earlier on digital skills? I chalk it up to the structure of the lessons, which played a vital role in our learning pace. Every day, our mentors introduced us to a new area of Digital Skills with detailed explanations, real-life examples and activities. They ended each day with effective group discussions in our own breakout rooms.
Key Takeaways
From day 1, the mentors made the lessons interesting and productive. One key takeaway I learned was that User Experience (UX) encompasses all aspects of user interaction with the company, its services, and its products. To guide our own UX research, we were taught the Double Diamond Design Process which can be used to visualize a creative process.
Individually, we carried out tree jacking exercises to test our information architecture by carrying out ‘reverse card sorting’ before starting on our individual websites. The best part of this lesson was that we were able to try this framework on our own SME challenge in our groups, allowing us to understand our target users better than before.
The following lessons were about UI Research and Marketing, where we primarily learned how to create websites and make them more appealing than other similar platforms using 3 main apps — Square, Figma and Wix. During the Marketing lessons, we learnt about creating a successful landing page and what makes a good website.
Visual Proposition was a major takeaway for me. Its presence proved to be more significant in a website than basic aesthetics.
Creating a website
With the skills learned from Digital Skills Week, I can now rank the elements of a website from the most significant to the least. I included all of the most important details of the website before concentrating on the aesthetics. Then, I used the Double Diamond Design process to help me understand my users and streamline the website. My website was related to event planning, so it was vital that it looked appealing so that customers could trust the company’s services and aesthetic taste. For a service provider, social proof was very important for users to trust the company to handle their personal events, so I decided to add an extra page for reviews.
Overall, I now know what essential elements should be included in a website and how to create an effective website.
As the saying goes, “Learning is a treasure that follows its owner everywhere”. My learning from this week will continue to help me throughout my journey in the CareerContact Digital Skills Sprint.
CareerContact is an ed-tech platform designed to bridge the gap between school and work. We help students develop digital skills and connect them with SMEs in Southeast Asia. Feel free to reach out to us at CareerContact.cc or sign up to our courses on Thinkific.
