I have been professionally designing web sites for over 15 years. You can see examples of my work at jdwwebdesign.com. I have also taught web design in the school of business at Fanshawe College. Building a web sites is extremely labour intensive but I love it.
I use information architecture when I work with a client to build a site. Webmonkey has a set of tutorials if you are interested. Clients are always changing things in the navigation that takes time to change which costs $$. To get a client on board, I always create an information architecture document. I give the client questions and from those questions we build an architecture. The client then agrees to go with the plan and then if there are any variations, the client has to pay. It may seem like a small change to the client but in a static website, a change to the navigation could me a change to 100 pages. When working on Linda Lundstroms web site, a change to the navigation meant a change to 1000 pages.
What I liked about this activity was the WAVE accessiblity site. I already use a few accessiblitiies site with my students so I’ll add this is one to my delicious bookmarks as well.
Web Design and Moodle
As an experiment, I thought I would bring my webworkshop into my Moodle course site. John gave us a demonstration on ‘how to upload html pages into moodle’ (via the Wimba discussion)… which is great if you only have a few files to bring in but I have about 100 files. It would have taken quite a bit of time to upload everything. Adding html files to each module can only be done one file at a time. I have 60 html files which would take way too much time. I decided to keep everything on my web server. I linked to my webserver by choosing “Add a resource” and then choosing “Link to a file or web site”. I put the link inside the frame so the student remains inside of moodle.
I do understand that it is harder to track the student ‘s engagement with the content. The only thing that would be reported is if the student went to that frame. It will not report on all the pages the student visited. For reporting purposes, this would not be the best solution.