My 753 Web Page April 12, 2008

I created a web site for my high school’s summer reading program. The site consists of a main page, describing the program, and two secondary pages—one for freshmen and one for sophomores through seniors. In addition to describing the summer reading program, the main page also externally links to the high school library’s web site and catalog, a local public library’s web page, and Amazon.com—all sites that students can visit to locate a copy of their chosen summer reading book. Amazon.com also offers publisher and reader reviews that might interest students who have a hard time determining which book to read. Each secondary web page lists selected titles (and the publishers’ annotations and cover images) from which students can choose to read. I used numerous anchors on the sophomore-senior page, so users could easily navigate through the long list of titles and annotations. Furthermore, I attached a PDF file that serves as a brochure for all of the summer reading titles and annotations for users to print out if desired (some may want a hard copy of all of titles to carry with them to the library or book store).

Overall, I am pleased with the design of my web pages. The colors, style, and layout are consistent with each other and pretty similar to the high school’s web page. I think students would find it pretty user-friendly, navigable, and clean. I have to send a shout-out and big thank-you to Renee Keilman who taught me how to design a page with one large table, making my site look more “advanced” than it had previously. Check out my first draft below. (Yikes!–old school, right? )

Nevertheless, I have “big plans” to do more with the site. Ultimately, I would like our school to be able to use these pages. So, for a little fun, I would like to create a series of pages that link students to “quiz/survey” (a series of informal questions) that might help them choose a book of their interests. I would also like to create a page that allows students to login with their ID numbers and choose the summer reading book, which, in turn, would send a message to the summer reading coordinator. With this information, the coordinator could set up a database, listing all of the students signed up for each book and then separating the students into discussion groups.

Let me know what you think.

Here’s the link: http://domin.dom.edu/students/carrcynt/LIS753/MainSumRead1.html