Feature stories by Kirby Hall Internet Community

Feature stories SXSW Multimedia Festival report

Building the Perfect Web Site

This was my favorite panel and the one I found to be most enlightening. I have been creating basic web pages for a year and was ready for the presentation. By that, I mean I had invested enough time struggling with HTML (hyper text markup language) to be familiar with the problems and issues discussed in the forum. The WEB is a hot topic and the speakers were well chosen.

Speaker 1

The first speaker was from Texas Monthly. The had many great suggestions that I have benefited from. This web site has been fully redesigned and refocused based on the discussion of this forum.

Point #1 Know your audience. What browser do they use. Why do they come to your site? How can you provide them with content and information that they will keep coming back.

for statistical information on web user check out: Cyber Atlas

I have tried to make this site for the students, teachers, parents, and administration of our school. We are focusing our research and discussion on finding new ways to use computer technology to improve education.

The speaker went on to show examples of great web sites and give reasons why he liked them. Best Navigation C/Net. The user always know were they are and the navigation tools appear frequently and in convenient locations. C/Net also is an example of a web site about a web site. The focus is computers and the computer industry. The likely audience of a web site is computer users and people who like and use technology. C/net gives their audience information in which they are interested.

Speaker 2

Thomas Kogdale of the Sterling Group was the second speaker. Thomas emphasized information content by showing us the FedEx web site. It is a great example of real information that users need. They want to know were their package is located. Thomas made the point that 90% of the information a company would put on a web site already existed in the companies data structure. In the case of FedEx they already had an active tracking system which they use internally every minute of every day. It was not difficult to like this active data structure to a web site and provide the audience with tools needed to obtain the information they needed. Much of the data needed for high information content web sites already exist in the organization, developing tools so that the web users can access and view the information in the focus of our task.

We plan to develop tools for parents and students to be able to view our existing information such as weekly lesson plans and upcoming events. Further we have begun research in developing Web tools to teach and distribute math lessons Algebra 1 through Calculus.