This web site was designed by Miss P. A. Baxter (art & design teacher at Auchinleck Academy). The following information will hopefully give you some advice when designing a website for education.

The website was created using Macromedia Dreamweaver, the graphics were created usin Adobe Photoshop.

Designing a web site can take time and needs to be well planned. It is however, a rewarding and exciting experience. For some schools and education authorities, finding a web server that will host your site may be a new issue. There are several places that will host your web site. Some servers will charge for this and others do it for free. There are positives and negatives for both. The free servers tend to include non-educational banners and advertisements that may display inappropriate material for pupils. The web servers that you pay for offer extra services such as resource tools that help you build your site and you can usually get a web address that is easy to remember. One web server found that offers 50MB free space, email, etc. with no advertising is www.ecosse.net. It is also advisable only to use limited pupils’ photographs on the Internet and only if absolutely necessary. You must always have parent and pupil permission to publish these.

It takes a long time to design an effective website, as a designer myself I needed to be in control of the way the site looked and no templates were used. All the graphics and each button was created by myself using Photoshop. Photoshop is a software package that every art and design department should be using. It is art and design industry standard. Photoshop is such a powerful package that as a designer you stay in control of your work and tell the computer what to do. Other more basic packages might be slightly easier to use, but they control you and as designers this can be very frustrating.
Do not under estimate the time it takes to design a website, this site is not finished yet and will continue to grow. This is how it should be, an effective website is an up-to-date, active one and is much more rewarding.

DESIGN TIPS

You must always remember who your audience is, what the site is for and how long the visitor is going to stay! The pages need to be user-friendly. Some people have designed websites that use a lot of ‘tricks’, such as background music or complicated animation’s. The first time visitor may be impressed, however after a few visits, they will just get annoyed. Try to avoid using these large files or you will find your visitors leaving the site due to boredom. If a page takes longer than 30 seconds to download, most of your visitor will leave your site. Remember young people are easily distracted and never include more than one moving image as they tend to distract the viewer from the important stuff!

Avoid the temptation of using beautiful, ornate background patterns. They may make a beautiful piece of design, but they act as a terrible background for text, it just confuses the eye. Try to use contrasting colours for the background and the text, there is no point having a light coloured text on a light background.

Text does need to be considered carefully and designers are used to typographical rules that are taken for granted in the print media. The difference is that a web page is read on screen, although a lot of people prefer to print out the pages in order to read them on paper. It is very difficult to read on screen and we are not used to it. There are ways to make this more comfortable for the reader and reduce eyestrain.

In the print world serif typefaces are much more easier to read (these are fonts where each letter is almost linked together by a ‘flick’ (serif) ie. times new Roman. The serif creates a line for the eye to travel. However, the typefaces without the serif (sans serif) were designed for the use on the screen as their blockiness makes them easier to read.

It is more natural for the viewer to read from left to right, so stick to left aligning. Never justify the text, and there should be limited use of centred text. Never have a paragraph of UPPERCASE, this makes it much more difficult for the eye and brain to register. Finally, Italics are also difficult to read on the screen as the pixel grid of the computer screen fights with the angle.

Firewalls:

Firewalls can cause problems when you are ready to upload your site using Dreamweaver. There are only certain people in an education authority who are allowed FTP access. This means that unless you have permission the website cannot be uploaded in your educational establishment, through the Firewall. Which kinda defeats the purpose really! However, if the site is to be hosted by your Education Authority they should be able to give someone access to update the files in school, just make the necessary request.

P. A. Baxter