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Creating and Maintaining a Good Course Website
This month's Virtual Companion, designed to accompany the article, Seven Principles for Good Course Web Site Design, The National Teaching and Learning Forum, Vol. 7 No. 3, provides links to several resources for those interested in creating/maintaining good course websites. There is a tremendous amount of useful information on the web about website design, HTML, and what it's all about. We provide links here to several sites that will be of assistance to both beginners and seasoned HTML authors alike.
General resources.
- HTML 3.2 Reference Specification from w3C. The definitive reference. You can also get w3C's latest recommendation (v._4.0)
- Crash course on writing documents for the Web. PC Lab's easy to follow basic guide to HTML authoring. Perhaps the place to start if you are brand new to HTML.
- NCSA (at UIUC) Beginner's Guide to HTML--a great primer for new users as well as a handy reference for the more experienced.
- Yale's C/AIM Web Style Guide, a particularly well-written guide to Web design, especially on issues of site structure and organization.
- The Compendium of HTML Elements. Provides an alphabetized hypertext list of all HTML tags. Very useful resource.
- HTML Writers Guild HTML Resources. Has links to lots and lots of worthwhile information on HTML authoring.
- Internet Sourcebook. Bills itself as the "Gateway to Technology Companies Doing Business on the Internet." Has some useful links.
- Web Developer's Journal. An E-zine for web developers--very useful site.
- Many colleges have help pages for constructing web pages that can be accessed from their main site. Below are some samples of web help sites--two from the universties with which we are associated, an educational consortium, and a governmental agency, all of which have tons of links to various sources of assistance.
Web authoring tools.
There are web authoring tools that can make the task of writing HTML code easier. We begin with some general information sites, then links to sites where information about and downloadable versions of various web authoring tools can be found.
- General information on web authoring tools.
- Examples of shareware/freeware web authoring software:
- You can download various shareware versions of web authoring tools (as well as hundreds of other programs) at Shareware.com
- AOLpress 2.0 is a WYSIWYG editor that you download for free. It seems to work well, and the price is right.
- The following shareware/freeware products require some knowledge of HTML:
Other interesting sites.
- Vincent Flanders' Web Pages That Suck says you can "Learn good design by looking at bad." The site has lots of examples of what the author thinks are bad design. The examples change often--once people find out they're being used as an example of Web Pages that Suck, they fix them up, causing poor Vincent to find a new example. As he says, he's cleaning up the net one page at a time.
- Web site garage will check your site and diagnose its strengths and weaknesses. They rated Tom's site as poor on load time (ouch!) but theirs loaded even slower, so he doesn't feel so bad. The diagnosis is free; they'll fix it for you for a fee.
- A Kinder, Gentler HTML Validator. It really is. Even though it pointed up lots of errors in Tom's page (he apparently has trouble with tables), he reports that it didn't make him feel like a complete idiot when it showed him his flaws. It's very fast and thorough.
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