Building a Web Site
of Your Own

Ideas for Improvement - Things to do after the 5-session class

Some school districts provide lengthy guidelines and rules to prescribe what pages should look like (e.g. Plano School District in Texas).  Some of their ideas may be good, but we hope that our staff can be trusted to make sound educational decisions about their school pages without imposing a bureaucracy.  With that said, how about making an effort to keep your new site current and improve its appearance and utility?  For example-

Try these ideas:   For some, adding a counter might be all it takes to make them happy with their page.  But there are other ways, using the skills you've already learned in the five week course, that you can improve your web site.  For more ideas to enhance page layout and design (besides those listed here), consider using resources such as the reference book Web Design:  The Complete Guide by Molly Holzschlag.  

Color - Consider adding some web safe colors to enhance the appearance of tables.  One good idea is to add some very light palette colors to the heading cells at the tops of columns. Space - Increase the amount of empty space on a page to give it a less crowded feel.  Whenever possible, this means use less words.
Fonts - Rather than using the default font of the web editor, consider changing the font to a family of sans serif fonts such as "arial, geneva, helvetica" Page Width - It is possible to control the exact width of a page (regardless of browser settings) by putting the entire contents of a page in a single cell table of specific width (e.g. 580 pixels).
Alternate Text - Consider going to the picture properties for important graphics and adding an alternate text to be shown in case a browser doesn't display (or is set up not to display) the images on your page. Page Titles - Go to page properties and give each page a good descriptive title.  Not only will it display in the title bar, but search engines will catalog the page title descriptors so others can search for your page by topic.

Once your page is ready to go, there are online sources that will "check" your page to make sure there are no glaring HTML errors and let you know about download times, etc.  Using FrontPage 2000 should do most all of this for you, but for an outsiders analysis, try Dr. Watson.

~Concluding Thoughts~

I must confess, the six simple suggestions above are things I don't spend nearly enough time doing.  Let's face it, we all have families, jobs, other responsibilities... we have lives!  But when you have a chance to make a little improvement, try one or more of these things out.  With practice, you'll begin to incorporate them as a regular feature when you initially build a page - Wow, you'll plan ahead!  Just remember to use moderation.  Too much of any good thing can become gawdy.  And too much focus on improving your pages means you may NOT have a life.  

Last but not least, think about the ways your new skills might be applied to enhancing the educational opportunities for your students.  Think curricular integration.  Think higher order thinking.  Think active learning & engagement.  Think authentic learning & real world connections.  Think thinking.

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