What Makes an Effective Website?

An effective website must be useful, meaningful, and accessible to its intended audience. One of the bigger problems with creating an effective website is establishing exactly "who" that intended audience is. The website that an elementary school student finds as perfect will not be perfect for graduate students or professionals, and I believe too many sites attempt to be all things for all people.

Content an style are the two elements that make for an effective presentation on the web. The content needs to be a narrow enough focus that it delivers the intended message clearly, without being diluted. Yet the site must provide access to many more general offshoots of the topic if the audience might be interested. This is where the links need to be well organized, yet not made prominent. And that is where style comes into play.

Early on in the life of the web, it seemed that many sites just wanted to grab your attention, and then not do anything with it. It seems every web element that could blink, flash, spin, beep, or dazzle was employed on many sites just to show the world, "look what I can do!" (The fish on my own blog are a good example of that. Guilty.) Now it seems web designers have joined up with the communications professionals and have started putting together more effective, sleek packages that efficiently deliver the intended message to the intended audience, without unneccessary bells and whistles.

I'm planning on using Dreamweaver to develop my website for the Bridge activity. I've had a little experience using it in the past, find that it is fairly intuitive for me, and hope that having access to it at work will give me some more options time-wise. It is also easier for me to design a page when I start with an existing framework-- like the many online web design resources offer templates. I believe appropriate images make a page more visually engaging to the audience, and I'll need to incorporate tables and charts from the Excel files. It would seem silly to create a website to display all the data I hope to and NOT link to MyMCPS, the Outdoor Ed website, and other Outdoor and Environmental Education websites, so I'll provide links to those as well.

I'm currently debating about sound and video. They may not be neccessary, and may actually distract from my message as I was mentioning above. If I can find or generate appropriate files, I may use them, but am currently leaning against it for the Bridge activity.