• The MyUCDavis course web page creation tool

• Concepts of Web Design and Usability as presented by government, university and commercial web sites

• Course web pages that we can examine and evaluate

MyUCDavis (http://my.ucdavis.edu) is the default home page for campus classroom computers, for it offers faculty easy access to e-mail, class rosters, and other relevant tech tools, such as class mailing lists, an online gradebook, and course web pages. Because MyUCDavis gathers information from registrar databases, students can and do discover faculty-established information about their classes as soon as they sign on to MyUCDavis. Therefore, it makes sense that an instructor will use the course-builder tools to make important information readily available to their students.

In this workshop, I will quickly introduce the MyUCDavis Website Builder tool. For a more comprehensive and illustrated step-by-step tutorial, visit the Instructional Design Studio page created by the Teaching Resources Center.

In the future, you might also visit the page from which you can view MyUCDavis course pages created by other faculty on campus.

If you'd like someone else to design a site for you:

Those with ambitious plans for a web site can enlist the help of the Educational Technology Group at Mediaworks.

If you'd like to design a site yourself:

Consider enlisting the help of the TRC, or the staff at The Arbor. The Arbor can be reached at 754-2115

 

Advice from UCD Sources

Training materials created by Mary Jacob for the ET Partners Program explain in paragraph form a number of ideas to keep in mind when creating academic web pages. See also the ET Partners Site.

The National Cancer Institute has created excellent evidence-based guidelines for web design, focusing on making sites easier to view, navigate, and understand. Visit a few of the items on the table of contents (such as Setting Goals and Design Considerations). Much of this same information can also be found at http://usability.gov/.

The Yale Style Manual is one of the first and most-respected guides to designing for the web. See especially its discussions of the Purpose of Your Site, Design Strategies, and The Introduction to Site Design.

 

 

Jakob Nielsen's usability site, http://useit.com/, is the most famous. Many usability experts admire his hard-line refusal to litter sites with clashing text colors, unneeded frames, and sizeable images that slow down users' appreciation of a site. Nielsen's most recent column, Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability, is immediately relevant to the topics of this workshop.

Other sites in this vein include Usableweb, the usability page from Webreference.Com, and the unlikely Webpagesthatsuck.com.

Two good sites on the need to make all sites accessible include http://www.washington.edu/doit/Brochures/Technology/universal.design.html and http://trace.wisc.edu/world/web/.

As I mentioned earlier, one can search UCD web pages by visiting http://class.ucdavis.edu (you’ll be re-directed to a MyUCDavis page). Make sure to search only for pages with online content.

John Stenzel has created course web pages that make it straightforward for his students to view and download necessary class materials. John obviously follows Jakob Nielsen's advice, as you can see on the page for his Children's Literature class. (On the subject of print-friendly web pages, see also this Jeff van de Pol article from the IT Times.)

Take a few minutes to visit other pages, both here and at other universities:

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/Simonton/p185wmain.html#D

Simonton's History of Psychology Page

http://trc.ucdavis.edu/msjacob/chn11/

Mary Jacob page with interesting use of graphics

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~grs22/index.html

A site from Dartmouth

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~engl28/

Milton class at Dartmouth

http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/
The World Lecture Hall