Evaluating Educational Websites

This week I learned a lot about how to evaluate different websites and what features make a good website. The book, Web Design in a Nutshell suggested the importance of being able to open websites on different browsers and screen sizes. Other articles, such as the Ten Good Deeds in Web Design provide many other ideas of ways to evaluate websites. This article mentioned the importance of having a search bar, having the Logo take you to the homepage, having subheadings and simple paragraphs, and link titles. Jakob Nielson, also wrote an article that gave ways to evaluate websites such as splitting up long information in to different pages, using bulleted lists, and subheadings. Another article stressed that content was more important than graphics.

From all of this criteria presented in the readings, I was able to evaluate 5 educational websites. Most all of the websites met the criteria which was impressive, however they were all designed slightly differently. I never thought about how much planning goes in to making a website, but through the assignment this week, I learned much about the little things that go into making a website accessible, aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, organized, and uniform. I am looking forward to working with my group to create a rubric of our own to use to evaluate websites in the future.