Rationale For The Design Of My Web Page
Why? Why? Why? When you search the web looking for information about anything, you have several choices about which websites you will choose to pursue your search. What factors influence us in choosing one website over another? Obviously, content will be important because you want to find out something about a topic. However, before you can read every single web page you need to decide which of the many available web pages that you want to invest your time in reading. For me, that choice will be a web page that is clean and organized and is simple to navigate. Then, of course, the text needs to be well-written and to the point without a bunch of rhetorical flourish. I'm a busy woman and I don't want to spend my valuable time reading something that can be said in a few paragraphs. I want to have my own web page reflect those same values.
In doing our rhetorical observations I found that I was more attracted to strong, simple designs than those designs that were crowded with busy little boxes, multiple types, and various lines and shapes. I tried to maintain those values in my own web page. As for text, I like a page with short paragraphs or bullet points. Too much text makes me impatient and I wonder why I have to read so much to get to the meat of the topic.
The home page should let the reader know your topic without a lot of frivolous information or design elements. I think my home page is straightforward and not at all confusing to a reader. The picture and title alone let you know that this web page will have something to do with kids and helping them read and write better. I feel that a cutsey gimmicky home page might be a turnoff to someone who is doing serious research on the subject.
Several of the other pages in my web site also have a picture related to reading. At first, I had the same picture at the top of every page, but that seemed kind of boring and unimaginative. These aren't my own personal photographs, but just pictures I found at Google Images. If I had more time and skill I would have chosen to use pictures of my students instead. The Thinking Maps pictures are also from the web because I have only taught a couple of kinds of Thinking Map and honestly, the pictures of my students' work are not as good as the pictures on the website I used.
When I was designing the navigation bar I first had the pages at the top of the page looking like file tabs. I liked the look of that, but thenumber of tabs available was limited. After putting in four or five of them, the next tab t said, "more. . ." I didn't think that was very helpful to the user because they would have to look in the "more. . ." tab to find out if there was information that they wanted. I wanted users to have all their choices right in front of them, not hidden. So, I changed to having the navigation bar to the left which seems unlimited.
Overall, the look of my web page is exactly what I wanted. It's clean, orgainzed, and most important it's not busy and cluttered. I hope users find it to be both lovely and helpful.
In doing our rhetorical observations I found that I was more attracted to strong, simple designs than those designs that were crowded with busy little boxes, multiple types, and various lines and shapes. I tried to maintain those values in my own web page. As for text, I like a page with short paragraphs or bullet points. Too much text makes me impatient and I wonder why I have to read so much to get to the meat of the topic.
The home page should let the reader know your topic without a lot of frivolous information or design elements. I think my home page is straightforward and not at all confusing to a reader. The picture and title alone let you know that this web page will have something to do with kids and helping them read and write better. I feel that a cutsey gimmicky home page might be a turnoff to someone who is doing serious research on the subject.
Several of the other pages in my web site also have a picture related to reading. At first, I had the same picture at the top of every page, but that seemed kind of boring and unimaginative. These aren't my own personal photographs, but just pictures I found at Google Images. If I had more time and skill I would have chosen to use pictures of my students instead. The Thinking Maps pictures are also from the web because I have only taught a couple of kinds of Thinking Map and honestly, the pictures of my students' work are not as good as the pictures on the website I used.
When I was designing the navigation bar I first had the pages at the top of the page looking like file tabs. I liked the look of that, but thenumber of tabs available was limited. After putting in four or five of them, the next tab t said, "more. . ." I didn't think that was very helpful to the user because they would have to look in the "more. . ." tab to find out if there was information that they wanted. I wanted users to have all their choices right in front of them, not hidden. So, I changed to having the navigation bar to the left which seems unlimited.
Overall, the look of my web page is exactly what I wanted. It's clean, orgainzed, and most important it's not busy and cluttered. I hope users find it to be both lovely and helpful.
