ECI 575 - Web Development for Educators - Agenda for Week of November 29

Tasks

• Nice Resources
• Design Issues and your Web Site
• Another Good Resource for Style Sheets
• Fine Tuning Educational Web Design
• Individual Review of your Final Project
• Assignments

Nice Resources

Quizzes

• Quia, a free quiz generator that has many different templates. Quizzes give immediate feedback. All info is stored on their site.
• My home page on Quia. Note that the Java games do not work in Internet Explorer for the Mac.

Search Engines

• Atomz, a free search engine for sites containing under 500 pages. Actually, the page you want is now the “trial account” page. Sign up for Atomz Express, and you can use it free for an unlimited amount of time.
  • Atomz Search

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Design Issues and your Web Site

Take a few minutes to reflect on these short pages from Jakob Nielsen and others regarding Web Usability. They are found at his web site, and are explored in depth within his new book Designing Web Usability.

• Web Usability Resource Page

Apply these ideas to your site!

Say, visit the above page! It's got some great links in it. I forgot how good that list was!

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Another Good Resource for Style Sheets

Builder.com is one of those web-nerd sites that maintains a great many resources and articles too big to really take advantage of. Still, they have an excellent section on Stylesheets. (Scroll to the list on the bottom of the page for the more basic articles).

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Fine-tuning Educational Web Design

• HTML code for distribute non-web files. Use View Source to see the code. The example downloads a .sit compressed file of a graphic.
• WebWhacker for downloading entire web sites.
• Each page should have the following:
  • The names of everyone who has worked on that page
  • A clickable mailto for comments
  • The date the file was last modified

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Individual Review of Final Project

Please email Dr. Hollenbeck regarding final projects. You should show the following:

1. Identity of target audience
2. Statement of purpose
3. Main objectives of the website
4. An outline of the information your site will contain.
5. A site flow chart
6. A site skeleton

Get your site up and running on your local computer, then find 5 classmates to work with your site. Watch as the look around and observe where they are having problems. Find out their likes and dislikes. See Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.

See what others are doing by going to the 575 Student Work page.

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Assignments for week of December 6

Lab Work

1. Projects - Final projects finished and mounted in two weeks.

Readings

• None required