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MENTORING REPORT

Barbara Darling-Smith and Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus have been designing a web site for the Religion Department. In mentoring their project I have tried to help them bring their vision of a conceptually organized site into being while avoiding many of the false starts and time-consuming re-workings that, sadly, characterized the first web-site design work that I did.

Barbara and Jonathan, and their alumna programming assistant, have put together a great deal of content for the site. Since I believe that content is far more important and far more difficult to create than style, I think they are actually quite far along in their project even though the site itself is not yet fully completed.

My mentoring has been mainly in the area of providing suggestions for organizing the site so that Barbara and Jonathan can go about arranging their copious materials in a simple and logical fashion. To this end, we collaboratively designed the following interface:

• The centerpiece of the web site is to be a hyperlinked graphic illustrating and defining the "six dimensions" that all religions have in common. I suggested that once an appropriate image was chosen or constructed, it could be scanned and edited using Image Mapper, so that each of the six dimensions would be linked to a page that defined the dimension, presented an appropriate image, and linked to a set of study guides organized for that dimension.
  
  
• This central, circular graphic should take up about two thirds of the screen. The remainder of the main page will be filled with two iconically represented links along the left and bottom "margins."
  
  
• Along the left side of the page, arranged top to bottom, will be a series of iconic links representing the ten major world religions. Each of these links will be connected to a "home page" for that religion that contains further links to: Glossary, Study Guides, Definition, Images, and External Links.
  
  
• Along the bottom margin will be a set of links to Professors (home pages of Religions Dept. Profs), Universal Glossary, Study Guides, and Syllabi. Each of these links will go to a "home page" for the particular subtopic which will be a list of further links (i.e., the Professors home page would have links to Jonathan's, Barbara's, and Jeff Timm's home pages, etc.).
  
  
• The Universal Glossary will be one large glossary file. Going to the Universal Glossary page will allow users to see a hyperlinked list (using internal anchors to the subcategory of the glossary file) of all terms in the glossary; using one of the glossary pages under a specific religion will show a list of only the terms applicable to that religion. Study guides will likewise be listed in a master list under Study Guides, and the links on the appropriate specific religion page will only provide links to the applicable study guides.

The central concept behind all of this organization is the idea that while users need be easily able to find the specific information they are searching for, what seems logical and simple to one user may not be so simple to another. I have learned that users hate having to click through multiple screens to find embedded materials (four screens "deep" is the maximum for regularly accessed materials, I think). Therefore information needs to be cross-linked in a variety of ways. That is, a student may come to look for the "Christianity Study Guide" through the "Christianity" section of the site or through the "Study Guide" section. By cross-linking like this, the designers of the site are able to reduce the number of actual pages created (i.e., there doesn't need to be separate "Christianity Study Guide" and "Study Guide: Christianity" pages, only different links to the same page).

Using a universal glossary file with internal links also reduces the amount of information that needs to be duplicated on the site. Such a combination also eliminates the problem (one of the biggest flaws of my first LTLC project, Seafarer) of students not remembering in which particular glossary they encountered a vocabulary word. Again, there will be a great many cross-links, but only one main data file (thus reducing storage needs and duplication of work by the site authors).

From my mentoring I have confirmed my belief that web sites are in fact best planned on paper. I had originally thought that I would be helping to write code or design web components or at least teach Jonathan and Barbara how to use PageSpinner or some related program. It turns out that I was able to contribute much more to the overall design of the site than I was (or was needed to) to solving technical difficulties. Having an idea of how html code works was helpful, but having to scrap and redesign Seafarer >from scratch twice (because of organizational and logical flaws) was much more valuable.

I also learned that there is more than one way to skin a cat in cyberspace and that not all the technical possibilities of html are necessary for a very effective and student-friendly site. Barbara and Jonathan and their alumna program did not seem at all interested in using "frames" in html. I think they were right. By avoiding using frames, for example, the Religion Site keeps the conceptual basis for the department's teaching literally at the center of things while at the same time saving immensely on programming complexity.

In conclusion: my mentoring project for the Religion department was probably more valuable to me that it was to them. The clichÈ that you never really know something until you have to teach it has really hit home. Now that I've helped work up a site in an unfamiliar area from scratch, I know what I will and won't do the next time I have to design a site for myself. Thanks, Jonathan and Barbara.

Last updated on 1/26/99; 1:46:30 PM
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