filed under Session Reports May 8th, 2007 Richard Anderson
Highfields Web Design Session - 8th May 2007
Today, I’ve been leading a web design session with students from Highfields Science Specialist School. Working in Adobe Fireworks and Dreamweaver, students have created simple four-page sites for a fictional company. Key topics/activities for the days included:
- The History of the Internet
- What makes a good website? (including looking at some bad websites . . . .)
- Evaluating an existing website: usability, accessibility, navigation structure etc.
- Simple logo design in Fireworks
- Using CSS (separating style from content)
- Adding links / images
Here’s a PDF mindmap of ideas for “what makes a good web design?”:
Here are some of the links we used:
- FrySteel.com - “Mystery Meat Navigation”, inaccessible - what not to do . . .
- Lynx Viewer - a good tool to understand how a site will sound if read by screen reader software to partially-sighted or blind visitors.
- The Wayback Machine - view webpages as they looked in the past
Student comments:
I thought today at the Wolverhampton Learning Centre was good. I learn’t a lot about how to create a web site. My web site was based around a sports wear company. I enjoyed it and thought it was a good experience.
Today was a good experience at the clc I would like to visit it again and learn different types of skills overall it was a good day out.
It was alright, the CLC (and R.Anderson) taught me a lot on how to make a web page.
Today, I learnt loads of new skills and i can’t wait to show my friends at school my web page- overall I had a good day!(well, it was better than school)
I am cool and today was cool and I learnt some cool stuff . . . by Alex M
Today was very good and I learnt alot of new things like how to make a cool looking website quite fast! Thank You, Alex K!!!
Today was a fun day out at the CLC I learnt to do lots of cool stuff with macromedia dreamweaver and make a cool website about lemmings.
Today the CLC was very interesting and I learnt lots of things about macromedia. I will no doubt buy the product now!
Today I have learnt lots of new things to do with DreamWeaver and, making websites! I hade a great day!
I had a really cool day and I learnt a lot of stuff it was better than going to school.
Today was really intersesting and I learnt a lot of stuff!! Using Dreamweaver was hard at first but once you get used to it, its really cool!!!! Aimus x
I had a really cool time using Dreamweaver to do things I never thought possible before! It was much better than school!
Today was the bomb! We had loads of fun and learnt lots and lots of new things it was much better than school!!!
Wow, I had a great time even though I was ill!
What the teacher said:
The resources and facilities are excellent. The students are motivated by using and seeing the most up-to-date resources. All students were attentive and learned new skills. Everyone enjoyed their experience.