The Forever Challenge of Website Design

The (Frustrating) Journey of Websites

The more I do websites, the more frustrating they become.  It's a bit like writing — once I figure out how to do something, I realize that there's a better way to do it, and that I've been doing it wrong the whole time!!!  And then I have a choice: do I start over from scratch??  Or do I try fixing all the old stuff that looks wrong???

Obviously, I can't go back and redo everything — that would take forever.  And I have this lovely collection of UDL Journey posts that I don't feel like retyping.  So at some point, I'll probably need to find a better system than Google Sites — something like Blogger, perhaps, or even WordPress.  Some online platform that actually keeps track of which posts I've written and where I've written them so I don't have to go through and manually link everything together.

Lessons Learned from Starting Fresh

So how did I come to this realization?  From starting over again, of course.  I've been working on this new English Language Arts Website for my job at YouthBuild McLean County, and the newness of it has encouraged me to really step back and reconsider the basics of my web design strategies, everything from images to navigation to text layout.

Now, it helps that I've taken additional courses about online teaching — lessons on backward planning from Heartland's Alternative Delivery Certification Course transfer really well to web design.  You have to know what you're going to put on the webpage and how many webpages you're going to need before you really start getting into the weeds of details.  It helps to map out your plan beforehand — this way, you can build the navigation directly into your website from the beginning.

But is that enough?  I thought it would be.  I figured that as long as I planned out a course into modules, it would be easy to build a detailed online program that I could use in the classroom with my students.  But then I caught myself getting distracted.  I went from writing learning objectives and assignment milestones to building in lists of outside resources and examples and even cautionary tales.   Let's just say that the "quick" website I was building has quickly begun to bloat.

Maybe bloat's the wrong term, though.  After all, it's good information.  For my page on writing newsletters with Google Docs, I embedded some YouTube videos that show how to format tables in Google Docs, and then I arranged the materials so that everything fits neatly on the page.  (Unlike like this rambling little blog thing, which has neither pictures nor a true layout.)  But if you check that page right now, you'll find it's a hot mess of navigation buttons that don't actually link to anything.  And that's an improvement!  I literally spent like three (four?) hours today figuring out which arrangement of buttons would best show off the twenty webpages necessary for my upcoming Digital Newsletter course.

But why does the course need twenty pages?  At first, I was thinking four pages total: an Overview, a page to describe Google Docs, another for Slides, and a fourth (final!) page for Sites.  But no.  Now each session of the course will need its own page because I was putting too much info onto each page.  For the page on Google Docs, the first two and a half sessions put me at 3,683 words of writing — and there's no way that's gonna work for a webpage.  I mean, seriously — what reader is gonna sit through fourteen pages of text on a single webpage?  What student in their right mind is gonna scroll through some 4,000 words of illustrated lesson plan — plus outside links! — just to find the day's homework?

So...I'm averaging 1,500 words of lesson text for each session of the course I'm planning — and that's on top of those outsides links to "recommended" reading and "optional" videos.  And that's actually about right — for this course, a single "session" is supposed to represent about a week's worth of a high school course.  I just vastly underestimated how much material it would take to fill each of those sessions.

Newsletter Course: The Old Plan

So...what's this new plan for the course layout?  Well, let's start with the original plan:

Newsletter Course (How It Started)

• Overview: A page to introduce the awesomeness!

• Google Docs: Let's make the boring work of research articles sound fun!

• Google Slides: Now let's add pictures the easy way!  Yay!

• Google Sites: And now I trick my students into designing websites, bwahahahaha!!  (soundtrack of evil music optional, but highly recommended)

Newsletter Course (How It's Going)

• Overview: A page to introduce the awesomeness!  And also the attendance and plagiarism policies!  And goals!  And...oh...I should probably turn some of these things into general policy pages for all my courses...

• Google Docs: Let's spend a session on collaboration!  Here's a YouTube video explaining how to share your Google Doc!  Here's a paragraph where I ramble on about sharing ideas!  Oh, and do you need some reassurance that all ideas are good ideas!  Trust me — all ideas are good ideas.  Until you delete them later.  And now let's move on to our brainstorming activity.  (And maybe now we'll think about starting on Session 2 of 8...except I have this next resource to share!!!)

• Google Slides: Now let's spend six weeks of class talking about how to use Google Slides to present your ideas using a more visual format!  And...when will I find time to plan this???

• Google Sites: And now I trick my students into designing websites, bwahahahaha!!  That's right, my little minions — web design is just like the merger of Google Docs and Google Slides!!!  Look how easy it is for me to organize everything into exactly the best...um...erp.  (Maybe I should rethink this one...)

Newsletter Course (The New Plan)

Okay, so here's the rather more boring outline that I'll actually use because it's somehow more manageable:

Overview: Making Learning Sound Fun.  Because of course it is.  And teachers would never lie about this.

• • Introduction to the course and digital literacy requirements.

  • Attendance Policy

  • Integrity Policy (Plagiarism and AI)

  • So.  Much.  Fun.

Google Docs: 8 Sessions of Research Articles Disguised as Newsletter Writing

• • 1: Genre of Newsletters.

  • 2: Designing a Thematic Template

  • 3: Research with Online Sources

  • 4: Organizing Materials into a Coherent Structure

  • 5: Drafting Detailed Articles

  • 6: Workshopping the Drafts

  • 7: Revising the Message

  • 8: Audience Outreach

Google Slides: Because "Death By PowerPoint" Sounds Way Less Painful When You Call It "Constructing Visual Narratives"

• • 9: Presentations versus Newsletters

  • 10: Image Use and Citation

  • 11: Capturing Audience Attention

  • 12: Arranging Text and Images

  • 13: Digital Effects with Transitions and Sound

  • 14: Public Speaking and Presentation

Google Sites: The Module Otherwise Known as "Let Me Share the Pain of Website Development with All My Students"

• • 15: Search Engines versus Fake Information

  • 16: Navigation with Headings and Internal Links.

  • 17: Embedding Images and Video

  • 18: Libraries of External Resources

  • 19: SEO and ADA and User Experience

  • 20: Presenting a Website In Person