The Lord Darlington approach to designing webinar presentations

Have you ever loved something that seems out of reach?

In Oscar Wilde’s comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Darlington is in love with Lady Windermere.  When she does not return his love, he leaves town.

Which is what a lot of people do with great webinar presentations…walk away from excellence when they could otherwise have what they want by building a business case for some help.

You see, I’m not a real designer (you know, one of those people who just ooze with talent).  It’s part of why I have to work at it so hard, and all I have to do to remind myself of what I’ve accomplished is to look back a year at my own presentations.

You can do it. You CAN do it.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is “where do you get your visuals?”  When I explain, though, that I actually spend some money to get them, quite often the sigh on the other end of the line might as well scream, “oh, it’s actually going to cost me something.”

Which leads me to Lord Darlington’s quote… “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Remember that a visual doesn’t have to be a photo.  I predominantly use istockphoto because of advanced search features, the ability to save “lightboxes” (collections such as “people” or “hands” or “collaboration”).  Yes, it’s not the cheapest service around, but it saves a huge amount of time when I spend day after day in front of PowerPoint.

Another service I like for non-photo stuff is PowerFrameworks.  Unlike istockphoto, they don’t have lightboxes and the search is limited, but when you need a wireframe for a 4-part process (or 3-part or 5-part or…), it saves a pile of time creating and editing shapes, especially when you want to demonstrate something more complex like relationship or process.

There’s no magic button for great webinar presentations, but if your time is valuable (of course it is!), you should be able to make a business case by figuring to the value of that time relative to the cost of speeding things up.  Good luck!

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