Making a Web Page

The current website has friendly sprawling pages and a variety of designs.

The school has an existing website created and maintained by our two instructional specialists. The site houses a variety of resources for teachers, but is a secondary part of their already immensely busy jobs. As a result, it is a conglomeration of pages added in the few moments they can steal between other responsibilities and has become the digital equivalent of the Hotel Deucalion from Nevermoor which endlessly adds rooms as the need arises. My project centered around adding a single page to this conglomeration of loosely related spaces the provided teachers access to English department materials.

One of the challenges to creating this page was ensuring that all members of our department were comfortable accessing the education resources. The users of the ELA Resources website already have an understanding of the content and want to access the materials they need quickly and easily. To lower the barrier to entry for staff short on time, I simplified the web page to minimize text and mismatched graphics. In the end, the page is simple with six buttons, one for each folder in google drive. Each button lists the resources available in the linked folder, and at the bottom of the page two lines of text summarize the purpose of the page and invite teachers to include their creations in the folders.

A screenshot of the ELA Resources page menu with a simplified format.

The ELA resources web page is a small part of the Instructional Specialist’s overall site, which allows it to build on an existing framework, and lets the Instructional Specialist continue to maintain oversight of the materials. While it is not an essential component of the web page, I chose a color palette that fits the overall theme of the page.

Looking Forward

This project continues in two fronts: the creation and organization of additional materials, and the continued collaboration with the Instructional Specialist to organize the overall website in a way that streamlines it so that teachers can access it more easily. Material creation includes finishing the remaining tutorial recordings (and making a corresponding section on the ELA resources page), and evaluating created materials and adapting them based on those evaluations. Website organization includes grouping the sub pages together in an intuitive way and ordering them so that the most frequently used pages are the most easily accessed.