Classroom Website Design: Organization

When you begin your website using Weebly or another website builder, you will likely be asked to choose a template.  This is the overall design and appearance of your site.

• Will you choose bright colors?  School colors?  Primary colors?

• Will you choose a fun, vibrant layout?  A classy, clean layout?

• Should you pick something with a sidebar?  Two sidebars?  Columns?
  

Keep It Simple

You can always change the template later, but you need to think about it now.  I try to live by the old acronym of Keep It Simple, Stupid.  From the very beginning, make this thing navigable.  Make it easy for people.  Make it easy for first-time visitors.  Make it easy for yourself.

Then, lay out a good framework on paper first.  If you are a kinetic person, use notecards with various features written on them so you can move them around.  Otherwise, just sketch something out.  What do you need in a sidebar?  What kind of navigation titles should you include?

Sidebar

If you assigned your blog to be your homepage like I did, the sidebar is the part that will remain the same every time someone tunes in.  I chose to include the following:

• a quirky welcome message
• a facebook Like button
• links to my school and district websites
• the school hours
• mission statements for our school and our district
• a way to contact the teacher
• a link to subscribe to my blog posts
• a list of awards our class and I have received
• a suggested fiction reading list
• a Quote of the Day widget
• links to archived blog posts
• two graphic hit counters
• links to my administrators and peers

Other options exist, as well, but that's a matter of preference.  You'll be able to pick and choose these things along the way, and by all means, feel free to change it up later.  Your tastes and opinions may change as your website develops.  Your site is fluid; go with it.

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Navigation and Sub-navigation

The menu options at the top of your website are the hub of your navigation.  Everything else spiders out from here.

My navigation menu was much more complicated before I streamlined everything to my preferences, since I did not plan ahead on paper.  Once I decided to take the plunge to simplify, I narrowed everything to four categories:

• the Homeroom tab, which brings everything to the blog page so folks can see the latest news, notes, and nonsense
• the Orientation tab, where people learn about the skeleton of our class, how we work, how we do things, and who the crazy teacher is
• the Positivity tab, which is a collection of upbeat and profound poetry, pithy prose, and particularly plump ponderings
• and the Exploration tab, where students (and others) can share in investigation and discovery lessons and projects

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It is no mistake that the first letters of our navigation tabs spell the word HOPE.  When the EF5 tornado carved a trench through Joplin (Our Community), the sign at Joplin High School was damaged, leaving only the letters O and P.  Someone used duct tape to craft an H and E to fit onto the sign before and after the OP, respectively, displaying the word HOPE.  The word has meant more to Joplin than it did before, and I wrote about it in my youth fiction book, Out of the Wind.

But I digress...

Hovering over one of the navigation tabs allows the subnavigation menu to drop down, revealing a plethora of options.  A person might click on the navigation words or point to a subnavigation topic and click there.  Either way, that person will then embark upon a magical journey to the chosen destination.  Many of those destinations are collections of projects or activities; others are the projects and activities themselves.  Again, most of this can be mapped out on paper ahead of time, before you launch it into cyberspace.

Then there are the sub-subnavigation pages:  if you hover on a subnavigation topic with an arrow next to it, yet another menu will appear.  Hopefully you can figure all of this out without me making this post any longer than it needs to be.

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Anchor Pages

In my post about updating your website, I urged you to do so regularly or not make a site at all.  I also spoke of clearinghouse pages that will house links to some of your daily posts.  We might call these anchor pages, places to collect similar thoughts in one place.  Such a page is our Teacher Collaboration collection:  whenever I post an activity or report on a project that I deem worthy of sharing with teachers who might be looking for ideas, I place a link on the very organized Teacher Collaboration page (Go ahead and check it out if you must, but remember to come back here; you haven't finished this article yet.).  There are several such collections on this website, many of which appear in all capital letters on the Teacher Collaboration page.

Please feel free to contact me or comment on this post if you have questions about your own site.

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