Step 7: Analyzing Website Examples
Unit 3 | Week 10 | ePortfolio Digital Track
Goals: Students will start to look at portfolio samples and think about how they want to market themselves as digital entities. Students will begin preparing their own sites. Students will look at lots of sample sites, good and bad.
Until now, the actual aesthetics of student sites haven’t mattered much at all, as long as they were functional. And while we still need our sites to be functional, in this unit we’re going to introduce students to visual rhetoric, and try to set up their sites to be meaningful (and ideally, a little easier to look at).
We’ll walk students through some basic web design principles (don’t worry, you needn’t know much about this yourself!) by looking at examples of good and bad websites, and getting students to think about visual rhetoric.
Preparing for Step 7:
❏ Locate examples of good and bad site design related to their theme, or use the default (see the A web of horrors activity).
❏ (Recommended): Have students do a ‘visual grammar’ or ‘visual rhetoric’ activity, such as the ‘Instagrammar’ activity in the visual toolkit or web toolkit.
❏ Have students investigate and ‘doctor’ bad website design in class.
❏ Have students work together to try new things with their own sites.
Examples of Step 7 in action:
Maria (Video Track): Maria spends a few class periods combing through their website they made specifically for this course as an example for their students. Students then work within their groups, asking questions, while Maria walks around and helps students as needed.
Together, they write some ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’ into a list.
Leo (Audio Track): Leo tells students that they will be finally beautifying their websites in class. Leo tells his class he’s not a design expert, but that together they’ll figure out some do’s and don’ts. He shows them several examples of bad websites from the Web Toolkit and his students have a hilarious time seeing how truly terrible web content can be. Leo asks students how they would ‘fix’ these sites. He then shows them popular website templates and asks them to think about them visually.
Together, they write some ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’ into a list.
Tips and Tools:
The internet is our friend here. While we’ve provided a handful of easy web-design activities here, there are gazillions of online tutorials for basic web design: don’t hesitate to use one or two if your students might find it helpful.
Keep it rhetorical!: This isn’t a web-development class, and it may be good to remind students of that. We aren’t trying to grade them for their web design skills, but rather encourage them to deploy their new-found digital rhetoric prowess in another (important) kind of genre! If students are still resistant, remind them that they might want to make personal websites someday to showcase their work and that this is great practice!
Back to Step 6.
Next to Step 8.