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Week 1: Take a Look in the Monitor Summer is the best time to do all those things you said you were going to do last summer. If you’ll just take about an hour a week this summer, we’ll get your home page back in shape for the coming academic year. First let’s take a look at your homepage and decide where improvements can be made. What do you see? When you look in the monitor, do you groan at your home page or do you see something pretty useful? Is the information current? How long does it take to download your page? Have you ever tried to download your page over a modem and clicked on stop before it finished? Examine the look of your page(s). Is there a unified look that reflects either you as a person or the organization the page represents? What do you want to see? Make a list of all the things you would like to see on your page. Would you like to add some more graphics? Are your current Brainstorm for ideas graphics a little drab and you’d like to change them? What information should be on your page but isn’t? What pages would you like to add to your current page? Go ahead and brainstorm for ideas. We’ll prioritize the list later. What do others see? Who is the audience for your page? If it’s students, try to look at the page(s) from their point of view. Do they see the information they need? Prioritize! add phone number add a calendar page of our department's activities and reminders recreate our forms as html pages for off campus download change the background make a resource of links add statistics about our department (i.e. % of Cameron students are part of our dept.) add a page of pictures of our department write a welcome message Is your page a resource for them or just something they happen to find, say "That’s neat," and move on. If your audience is the university or the general public, look at it from their view. Is your page easy to navigate? Can someone find information quickly? Are there phone numbers or e-mail addresses for a person to contact if they need more information? What would they want to see? Add to your list based on what others would want to see on your page. If you are in contact with your audience on a regular basis, ask them! If you maintain a department page, then add a short discussion on "what should be on our web page" to the next department meeting agenda. Next class period, ask your students if there is anything you can add to your page that would help them through the class. Are there some links to related sites you could assign to your students to review and plan to discuss before the next class? What can I do? Now take a look at your list and prioritize. Eight weeks is a long time, but no doubt shaping up your web page isn’t the only thing you have to do this summer. Plan on doing a few small things to your page, like updating the current material. Then decide on at least one major change. This could be adding a page or completely redoing the look and feel of your page. Now take a look at your calendar and write in appointments for at least an hour a week to work on your web page. Make it a goal to not plan other things during that time. After eight weeks of shaping up you’ll find yourself with a much stronger and fitter web page. Page maintained by Julie A. Duncan, Information Designer.