Browsing and browsing the web brought two things to my attention. The first was an article by Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate Magazine.  The title of the article is "Overdone: Why are Restaurant Websites so Horrifically Bad." The title provides a clear overview of his argument. Here are a few sentences that stood out to me: 

" Over the last few weeks I've spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell. I also spoke to several industry experts about the reasons behind all these maliciously poorly designed pages. I heard several theories for why restaurant sites are so bad - they can't afford to pay for good designers, that they don't understand what people want from a site, and that they don't really care what's on their site. But the best answer I found was this: Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant."  

I encourage you to read this short article. Aside from having some hilarious commentary and examples, it was eye-opening to me. Are we guilty of spending more time worrying about widgets, gadgets, mouse trail icons (please let these die), cute pencil shaped buttons etc. than we are about making sure teacher and school library media websites are workable for students and parents? Don't get me wrong. I LOVE a neatly embedded widget just as much as the next person. But sometimes all of this business overwhelms teachers and keeps them from designing and maintaining websites all together.

If you have wanted to start a website for your classroom or school library and cannot begin to imagine where the time will come from, let me encourage you to focus on the information parents and students WANT. Choose a tool and layout that is friendly and easy to explore, that a parent can quickly pull up on his or her smartphone, that will load quickly on your school's network.

This brings me to the second thing I ran across while browsing this week: The Organized Classroom's post on using Shutterfly to create teacher websites. Check it out! Another tool I recently fell in love with is Snap Pages. It works similar to Weebly in that you can drag and drop tools. A smaller number of free templates, but the upside is that you have much more freedom to modify these templates (in terms of layout, color, graphics). Plus, unlike Weebly, there is no need to mess around with HTML5 or CSS to modify the templates and save them as your own.

Here are some excellent examples of teacher  and library websites that use simple tools - easy to update, easy to maintain, chock full of information. Again, today we are focusing on practicality, not beauty:

1. Mrs. McCallar's Class - A 1st grade teacher's class website using Blogger
2. BMS Library Media Center - A school library using Google Site (a bit crowded menu-wise but good for ideas)
3. AISB Elementary School Library - elementary school librarian uses Net Vibes, social media included!
4. Mrs. Bentheim's Class - A 6th grade reading teacher combined a wiki and the free web design tool, Wix, to create an informative site.

Tips:

• Focus on the content and organization FIRST. If folks can't find the information you post, they will become frustrated and quit visiting the site.
• Use a tool that you can access at school despite the firewall.
• Use a tool you can easily update and share.
• Actually update it!
• Consider polling your parents and asking them what they would like to see on your class or library website.
• Use original, student-created clip art and music