1. Developing a Site to Present Materials Online TESOL Arabia 2005 Derrick Millard Email: derrick.millard@hct.ac.ae Doug McPherson Email: douglas.mcpherson@hct.ac.ae HD1 Dubai Women’s College http://www.dwc.hct.ac.ae/tesolpresentations

2. Who we are: Derrick Millard –M.Ed. In ESL –HD1 Webmaster with 4 staff divisions and 200 plus students Started on English web, teacher self-help and numerous projects Certificates in Web Design Doug Mcpherson –M.Ed. majoring in instructional design HD1 English Webmaster Certificates in Computing including MS Office Specialist, CNA

3. Basics of Web Design: Where Do I Start? Start with a PAD Purpose Audience Design

4. Purpose Have to have a reason for designing it –What are you trying to do? Is it a site for documents? A site for links? –Without a purpose there is no reason for making the site

5. Audience As important, if not more important, as purpose –Who are you designing for? –What is their level of technical experience? –Are they familiar with websites and computers? Not tech savvy, then you need a simpler design Dial up? If so less pictures It is your audience’s needs that you must consider, NOT what you want. Good purpose + good design – audience = NOTHING

6. Design (Part 1) Only when you know purpose and audience, you can consider design Makes or breaks a site Design differs but things to consider: –Author: Information on who the author is and how to contact? –nb. spam –Currency: when was the page last updated?

7. Design (Part 2) –Color and Layout: Are the colors easy to read? Have you considered everyone in your audience? How many pictures? How big are they? Remember more pictures = more download time –(nb. Do not reduce size in FrontPage. Use a picture editor) Pages consistent? Enough white space? Readable and standard font? Underlines?

8. Design (Part 3) –Navigation Where is the navigation? –Should be either top or left –Bottom of long pages as well? –No new ideas  follow conventions Does every site have a link to home? Are the links consistent throughout the site? What pages are you going to link to? Internal? External? Can you move ANYWHERE in the site in 3 links or less?