Tara's Cheap Tricks (For Faculty Web Page Design)

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What I use to build my web pages:  Sony MVC-FD73 Mavica Digital Camera 

 Click here to see photos I've done with this camera

 Click here for a scan made using the scanner shown above

 

Some goodies I wish I owned:
 

How to Grow A Chair : The Art of Tree Trunk Topiary

Sex Tips for Girls

Gardens of Obsession : Eccentric and Extravagant Visions

Good Night Mr. Holmes

Mistress

Crocodile on the Sandbank


The Wonderful Wizard of Oz/the Marvelous Land of Oz/Ozma of Oz : Boxed Set

Harry Potter Boxed Set (Books 1-4)

Including the odd, aesthetic, animated,
and personal to suck in surfers by their own choice.

INCLUDING THE ODD:

Academic sites are boring. It is one of the depressing facts of academia, that supposedly smart people, with interesting disciplines, make sites that are primarily useful as a sleeping aid. I refer you to one of the most deadly dull web pages in my discipline, the site for the Drama Department at Stanford. (It speaks for itself). Compare this with a typical home page of a drama student who happens to know about computers: Tony's Homogeneous Page. It is little wonder then that, ...

Surfers of all sorts prefer homepages to commercial and academic pages. It is therefore imperative that academic pages begin to do what commercial sites have been trying to do since 1997,  look like homepages.

Homepages are odd. They delve into topics as varied as web backgrounds created from scans of body parts, to the theory that Keanu Reeves is the reincarnation of Buddha. This kind of oddity amuses. Since this kind of oddity is rampant on college campuses, why is it absent from most official university web pages? A site like USD'S Walk on Water Page does more for visibility and recruitment than 100 brochures.

Odd Sites that Amuse & Intrigue

Offbeat
Does your college do any weird activities? At UAF where I work we do a ritual fruit sacrifice in spring where melons and other fruit are flung off our tallest building into the quad, in fall huge constructs are made and burnt by each dorm for first snow, in winter the engineering department builds an ice arch. NONE of these fun activities merit a page in the student activities section of the official UAF web site. This is a wasted opportunity.

INCLUDING THE AESTHETIC:

Art is cheap. Web backgrounds, bars and buttons of an animated and aesthetic nature are free for the asking for non-profit sites. Making your own graphics is much easier than you have been told. Otherwise, how would so many homepage builders who have free sites on Geocities and Tripod have more attractive pages than many corporations?

Compare these little home-made homepage sites with these professionally designed college sites and ask yourself which you would rather look at at 2am when you are clicking your mouse around to stay awake:

Personal Homepages

Official University Sites

 

Yale: Art Program

Engineering Student Page

 

Natalie Engel's Chest of Lust,
Longing and Obsession

Harvard University

 

Princeton University Program in Applied
and Computational Mathematics

Writing should be as catchy and cool as your teaching. Aesthetics are not limited to graphics, but include writing style, grammar, and spelling. No English department should even be allowed online unless it includes samples of the poetry and prose of it's staff and students. Any department in a college should at least try to use some kind of style for it's writing that suits the discipline or the teaching style of the department.

Music is cheap too, and in the form of midi files is a short download (other sound files are huge). Music departments can suck in surfers by making midi files of obscure dead composers' works and offering them for free. 

INCLUDING THE ANIMATED:

Animations are fun if not overused. In the form of animated GIF'S they are also simple to make and low in file size. Animated GIF'S are easily seen by most browsers without any additional plug-ins like Shockwave or Quicktime.  Gif Animations can also be useful for illustrating learning concepts to your students, as seen here without them needing Flash or Shockwave plug-ins or long downloads. Gif animation made this image of me and my cat doing the trick we show to grade school students who tour the Theatre Department at UAF:

 

 For example, the annoying flashing sign at the top of the page is an animated GIF. It was made by making two simple GIF'S in Photoshop (any graphics program will do-even simple ones), then combining the two in a cheap shareware program called GIF Construction Set (both making the GIF's and combining them can be done in this $20 program).

To learn more about making animations go to the Animation Page

INCLUDING THE PERSONAL:

Professors are generally interesting, eccentric and scary to other people. You can exploit the former and reduce the latter by opening up and being yourself online. Surfers are voyeurs. Compare these bio pages:

Interesting

Tedious

Cosma Shalizi (?), Physicist site has vanished

Frank J. Bova, Physicist
Theatrical Lighting Design Interactive by Kade Mendelowitz 
site has vanished

Thomas L. Long, English

site has vanished

Joel D. Chaston , English

William J. Burling, English
Muller's AstroGeophysics Rich Muller (same guy as left, but Dull page)
Professor David Jacques Lighting Design Website U.C. Berkeley Physics Steven Boggs 
Al Filreis's Home Page site has vanished

This is not to infer that the tedious sites belong to tedious people, but that any person can look tedious with one of those generic departmental bio pages that list only one's classes, vita, and e-mail.

For more on how to make your personal charm shine online, see the Cult of Personality page.

Tara's Cheap Tricks, Copyright 1997, Tara Maginnis, Revised 2002.

The Costumer's Manifesto is proudly hosted by William Baker.

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This Page is part of The Costumer's Manifesto by Tara Maginnis, Ph.D.  Copyright 1996-2010.   You may print out any of these pages for non-profit educational use such as school papers, teacher handouts, or wall displays.  You may link to any page in my site.