The Polliwog Journal

I am an English teacher, but one who integrates web technology into her 9th grade classes. What does that mean? It means my students use the web pages they create to publish their work, primarily. But it means so much more than that, and I could write a book to talk about it. But this is not about all of that. It’s only about one aspect that I also try to teach: good web design. It may be my art background, I don’ t know, but I think if you’re going to put your work out for the world to see, it had better be dressed in its best clothes. I teach my students about making their work easy to read. One of the complicating factors is that they also want to express their personalities through their design. However, being able to make choices that reflect more of themselves is exactly one of the powerful aspects of CyberEnglish. It’s just that there is sometimes a difference between what we like and what looks good.

So I think it is my responsibility to make web pages that are beautiful and designed for easy reading and navigation. I try to put into practice all the things I tell my students. Therefore, it annoys me to find so many teacher made sites that are horrible examples of good design. And many of them from intelligent people whose sites otherwise are content rich. But part of web content is visual.

The MAJOR offenders in bad web design are as follows:

• Text upon a graphic background (especially one that looks like your old maid aunt’s sofa)
• Text that goes across the entire page; use columns (tables) for goodness sake
• Text that is too bold, too big, too “loud.” I hate screaming text.
• Flashing gifs or anything moving. Too much animation is just annoying.
• Dark or black backgrounds with text that is not really readable. No one should ever have to squint to read anything on the web.
• Pages that scroll side to side.

Too many techno “geeks” who teach web design, actually only teach web creation, html, etc. They have no design sense whatsoever.

Time to retire this diatribe for now. But short of making my own “web pages that suck” list, I’ll continue to do whatever I can do to educate the teaching profession about good web design.