Week 2

This week creating a wireframe and a sitemap was some what challenging.  It is difficult to make decisions on what kind of pages you want on your website and really focusing on the information that needs to be out there for students and parents to be able to access.  I think this was much more challenging that I anticipated because I have been on maternity leave the last 8 weeks and haven't put much thought into what students and parents need to know lately.  The good thing about my first wireframe and sitemap is that I can always change them once I begin creating my web page.  As I transition back to being in the classroom, I think that I will be able to be more in tune to the needs of my audience. 

I looked at some of the websites that I thought were the best and the worst from last week and used them as models for my wireframe and sitemap.  I think it is important to not have an unnecessary frame on the left side of the page or have tons of links to other pages on your homepage.  You want your website to be streamlined and easy for people to read.  Reading the article Bottom - Up Design really helped me to think about what links I wanted at the top as categories and then what things fell into those categories to be in the drop down area.

While looking at various platforms for my website, I came to a few conclusions.  I definitely think Weebly has emerged as one of the easiest user friendly sites.  I think Wix can look really cool based on the ones that I have looked at.  I found the article Wix vs Weebly that helps breakdown the differences and similarities of the two. I have also seen really good sites done on WordPress and Edmodo.

I don't think I would use Wikispace because that is not really the aim of my website to allow people to contribute to the page.  I also think using a blog would limit some features that I would want to include such as a place for parents to access assignments, due dates, and syllabus in one location.  A blog would make people have to search for the entry where I included that information which would require searching different pages.  I am sure I will revisit the article above again and do a bit more research before I make a final decision about which platform to use.  

Question for the week: Reading over the document Using Word and DropBox for your site, it referenced a power point that I could not find.  Am I supposed to use Word to create my web page?