Designing a Website that Students Will Enjoy

Hi all,

This thread will include the slides from my presentation today with Chad Holden and links to some of the sites and files we discussed. For now, feel free to ask any questions you have about the subjects we brought up in the talk. I'm happy to expand on that information and start up a discussion with you.

One bit of feedback I've heard so far is that we didn't show many examples or go through a detailed case study. Quiet honestly, it's very difficult to critique someone else's work without first-hand information on the project and I'd rather not critique the work of someone who isn't there to defend the decisions that were made. Maybe I can track down a screen capture of my group's old site and compare that against what we're working on now. Trust me, we're not perfect and can tear our own work to shreds.

Aside from that, do you have any other sites you want to discuss the pros and cons of? This forum isn't under the same time constraints as the presentation so we can start a larger discussion now and express some subjective opinions instead of just advice and tips.

I also received some feedback that our talk implied we always do everything right. In the real world compromises obviously do have to be made. You pick your compromises based on your users' needs (which is why you ask all those questions early on) and try do work as efficiently as possible. You do everything you can to make the site as good as possible and then you launch it - that's just how it goes when you have a deadline to meet. If a site isn't perfect when it launches (and they never are) you should at least have coded it in a way that can easily be modified and improved in the future as time, budget, etc. allows and new user needs demand.

So ... questions, comments?

- Mike

PS. Talk notes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1982509/Techknowfile.pdf