DGfL Web Publishing Support

General Advice

Before you start, you need to know the intended structure of your site. Plan out all the topics you want to include and how they will link together. Many people advocate writing page titles on pieces of paper and positioning them into the required heirarchy - this can be easily rearranged as required. It should be clear to someone visiting your site how to find the information they want. Keep your site as maintenance free as possible. You are a busy teacher and don't have time to waste. If you intend to continually post children's work or newsletters, try to think of a way to make changes in as simple a way as possible, such as making your new news letter the same filename as the last one. That way you don't have to alter any links to get to it.

Consider the User

In Dudley, most of the machines are the same, with the same number of colours and screen resolution. This can't be said of the rest of the world, so consider how your page will look with different settings. Remember also that many people won't have the same fonts as you, so your perfectly manicured page may look entirely different to someone else. If the font is essential to the effect, then consider making a gif graphic title using text in Colour Magic, then setting the background colour to transparent, as we did on our introduction page. To be safe, plan on the conservative side and work to the lowest common denominator.

Where to Publish

Work can be published on the internet for people all over the world to see. This can be very effective in stimulating children's work.

Setting up your own school web page can have many benefits, including:

• promoting your school
• providing information (eg. via on-line newsletters)
• as a starting place to find your children's work
• Starting up e-mail pen pals: Getting letters is very rewarding for children. It's doubly rewarding to get an e-mail, and they'll be getting to grips with skills they'll need for the future.

Plan your web-site beforehand. This will ensure that as your site develops it will do so smoothly. Tip: A sheet of A3 and some loose labels are a useful planning aid.

Remember the content of your site is the most important thing.

Think carefully about where you want to publish - On your school intranet, on the internet or just within Dudley.

Have you considered the suitability of content?

How are you going to publish? Follow the link above for specific guidance using Front Page.

1. Content

This is the most important aspect of a good web site. The site must provide the visitor with the information they would expect.

The page layout, where appropriate, should lend itself to the information being printed off for reference when out and about.

The information on the site needs to be up to date and dated material should be removed as soon as possible.

Try and avoid duplicating content that is already present elsewhere on the web - there's little point in competing with already well established and successful web sites - far better to find a new angle and present original content to the visitor. If they've seen it all before elsewhere, they probably won't come back; repeat visits is the ultimate goal for any web site (the current jargon is "sticky eyeballs"!

Bear in mind that your site may be viewed by anyone around the world, so try to include something for everyone.

Of course, what you include on your site is up to you. There are lots of ideas to consider, such as using your site as an on-line prospectus, giving parents information about your school from the comfort of their own homes. You will probably want to include some pictures here as well.

As time goes on and more and more people use the internet daily, it might be a good idea to have a news page with links to newsletters that have gone out in printed form, or sports results, forthcoming events, requests for resources, reminders about raffle tickets, etc.

Parents will be interested to see some of the good work that children produce. There may be large quantities of this so organise it into categories/year groups/subjects. If most of the class has produced work on the same theme, it may be better to link to a separate page, from which each individual piece of work links. There are security considerations from displaying children's names and pictures with work. Check with the authority policy.

Viewers around the world will wonder what your area is like and just where you are. You may want to include a brief description of the area, pictures (Dudley CD Rom) and perhaps some historical information.

Your website can be for the whole school community, including the children. You may want to make sections interactive by including quiz pages, book review facilities, letters to the editor, etc. You may even want to produce your school magazine on line.

Of course, you don't have to do all of these things, and certainly not straight away. Bear in mind that your site promotes your school, so be careful what you include. Your senior management team should be involved too - after all, wouldn't they want some say in what goes into a printed prospectus?

2. Navigation

It's no good having good content if people can't find it easily. Navigating around the site needs to be intuitive - ie; where to go next needs to be as obvious as possible.

Static navigation bars can be very effective but can tend to get cumbersome on a large site. Better to have some basic static navigation links and add in a further layer of navigation as appropriate.

Navigation links should be placed consistently on the page across the whole site - this helps to make visitors comfortable with the site as each page has a basic underlying layout that is carried through the whole site, or at least that particular section of it.

Fancy buttons and the like are all very well but need to be used with care - they mustn't intrude upon the content or slow the site down badly and that brings us to...

3. Speed

Always bear in mind that what loads in an instant on your PC may take minutes to load when viewed over the web. Good web designers work to the 30/50 rule of thumb. That is that the ideal maximum page size is between 30K and 50K including all images, backgrounds and text. If your site uses frames, remember to add up the contents of all the frames.

The first page visitors arrive at should never exceed 50K and ideally should be less than 30K. If it doesn't load quickly, visitors will leave before it has completed. Your hit counter graphic may register lots of hits but your message is failing to reach the intended audience.

Break large pages up into several pages with good navigation links between them rather than present all the information on a single page. Visitors will rarely scroll down more than a screen or two (and if the page is larger than a single screen, it pays off to encourage people to view further down the page with some bookmarks and links to them on the first screen).

The single most common mistake that web designers make is failing to size and compress images effectively. Photographs should be stored in Jpeg format at the size they are to be displayed and compressed at least 70% and often can be compressed a lot further. Save a backup copy of  the uncompressed image and then keep upping the compression until the quality degrades to a noticeable degree. Make a note of  how far you could compress the image and then go back to the original and compress it to that point. This can make an amazing difference - an image may start out with a file size of 150K plus and compress to less than 20K without any noticeable loss of quality.

Avoid excessive use of images, especially animated Gifs. Flashing lines, rotating logos, whizzy little mail box images etc. may look "cool" but they can often irritate the visitor and detract from the page content. They also bump up the page download time badly.

4. Design

Use colour and images sparingly. Marquee, or scrolling, text can be extremely irritating, especially since it won't work on many browsers.

Make sure you have good contrast between your background and your text - you may have the latest multi-million colour graphics card but bet on getting visitors who are still using 256 colour displays.

Keep a consistent layout throughout. Changing backgrounds and text colours from page to page will confuse the visitor and they'll be off to someone else's site quicker than blink

Don't forget to view your page layout at a range of different screen resolutions - there are still a lot of people using 640x480 displays out there and WebTV is even worse.

Finally. always remember that the design is there to assist in delivering the content and navigation and must have the minimum possible impact on the speed. It's subservient to all the rest