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Web design is a wonderful way to unleash the creativity of students. Unfortuantely it is also a way to spend countless hours searching for or developing graphics and window dressing for pages. Often the lore of the things
I call cotton candy for the eyes, will result in students concentrating more on the technology than the learning process.
In order to help students avoid this pitfuall I adopted a mantra of "Web pages should
be food for the mind, not cotton candy for the eyes." As time progressed it became evident that successful educational web pages must be a blend of food for the mind and cotton
candy for the eyes. One without the other will result in a product that falls short of success. It dosen't take advantage of the medium in which it was created.
Pages need to be rich in content, but they must
also be asthetically appealing, as well as easy to navigate. Though they may be straight text, that can almost always be designed to take advantage of the hyperlink capabilities. Without that component it isn't web
publishing as much as it is print publishing being presented on the web. It is much like watching a TV show that is little more than text scrolling up the screen.
All of this requires a new set of skills or at
least adjustments and additions to current skills. The "less is more" approach to web page design used by OII, places an empahis on the content, not technology. By learning solid web design basics along with basic HTML authoring, with only a few hours of instruction, the novice user can begin creating well laid out, asthetically pleasing pages that take advantage of the hyperlinking, interactive and collaborative power of the web.
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