You know, it sure would be great if dial-up would disappear off the face of the earth, and would be relegated to a few antiquated history books. Don’t get me wrong — I’m thankful for my dial-up. But it’s just not possible to use the internet in a practical way these days when it takes 2 minutes to load a single page on a website. And I love to download pictures and articles and such.
Fortunately, UAF has pretty decent bandwidth. I do nearly all my online activity from a UAF terminal.
It sure is easy to manipulate websites with Dreamweaver. All I have to do is get the ftp password and I can manipulate my websites from any computer with Dreamweaver installed. Fortunately every lab computer on UAF has it installed.
I tried coding HTML on my own a few months ago, but it takes an eternity when I have to type every line into a text-editor.
The worst website I’ve ever seen would have to be my church website (www.mcgrathroadbaptistchurch.org; all due respect to the former webmaster who created the site long ago, whoever he was). Fortunately, I’ve been put in charge of rebuilding it.
As it presently stands (Oct 1, 2007), the site cries out for variety and elegance. The background to the index page has a cheap look to it and is unpleasant to stare at. The buttons all use the same basic ‘wood sign’ image, which are rather boring and, again, unpleasant to look at. The use of simple Times New Roman throughout the website has too much of a ‘word processor’ look to it, and makes the site seem even more sterile, uncomfortable, and uninteresting. And almost all the pages were very simply formatted using Times New Romans and simple line dividers, with no illustration, or illustration placed in an uninteresting manner. Furthermore, some text looks out of place when viewed on a widescreen monitor.
Functionally speaking, I believe the site falls short of one of its most important goals: to give people an impression, or ‘feel’ of the church. There are only two images of the church on the entire site, with no pictures of rooms, facilites, teachers, the pastor, or church functions. Furthermore, the site really should have a small map showing how to find our church, or at least our address.
Also, when I redesign the site, I’m going to think about adding somekind of online chat room or forum. Maybe it could be a tool to help church members get to know each other better (at least the younger ones).
Of course, in all humility, I recognize that the site was created a long time ago, and the church administration has never really maintained ‘webmaster’ as regular ministry position in the church. No doubt the site creator volunteered to create the site as I volunteered to redesign it.
I am a student in an IT program in Fairbanks, AK. This blog is meant to help me fulfill some of my course objective in the IT courses.
