Websites

As someone who professionally creates websites, I tried to approach this class through the mind of a student. What would be helpful to know? Where would I begin? What is the application for a student centered website? I found myself thinking about accessibility in web design and the often cumbersome language that is involved in building a website. It gave me a lot of ideas for simplifying web design and offering quick easy ways to cross over into the development side as well.

I think a web presence has become an integral part of being an artist in the digital landscape. As Rimi stated, it offers an arena to build literacy, design thinking, problem solving, and language skills. Beyond this set of tools, it also offers financial literacy, content creation and management, marketing knowledge, sustainable web practices, responsibility, and lessons around accessibility. These are all valuable lessons to learn whether you are intending to create a portfolio site or a small independent business.

Lesson Ideas:

• Wireframes & Content Creation: This lesson would focus on collecting the bones of your website before diving into design. It would teach sustainable web practices, user experience, and creative problem solving when building a website.

• Designing a Portfolio Website: This would be a web design lesson that would focus on building and maintaining a portfolio website that students could use to apply to colleges, internships, and galleries, or share with their families, communities, and peers.

• Creating a Professional Web Presence (Social & Websites): This lesson would focus on your digital presence as a young professional. We would focus on social media and websites as a tool to promote yourself.

• Using Adobe XD Create a Website Refresh for Your Favorite Brand — what elements would you change? What elements would you keep? Redesign 4 pages of the current website using Adobe XD to design and prototype your new version!