The World has enough Ugly Websites

As teachers, we do not need to contribute to the sea of ugly websites, the Internet has already enough of them.

Let's face it, we are not graphic artists or web designers, we are teachers. So let's stop pretending that we know how to make websites and leave all the fancy stuff to the professionals.

Years ago when I was teaching web design in  high school I would spend a lot of time with my students reviewing what made web sites not only functional but also good to look at. I would then conclude my lesson by allowing students to make the ugliest websites possible -- break every rule we just talked about and make an ugly website. It was a helpful exercise to get my students to get all of the ugliness out of their systems; so they would have animated logos, funky backgrounds with hard to read text, you name it -- if it was tacky they used it. With the ugliness out of their systems we would then start to build beautiful websites. The had learned the lesson.

But some teachers haven't learned this lesson.

As teachers we sometimes get sucked in by all that we can do on a website...

We add cute little animations.

Strange backgrounds.

Every page looks different.

We even put music in the background.

ENOUGH!

I tell teachers to just go to a free website creation website called Weebly, there are plenty of these kinds of websites so just pick one, and make a classroom website with one of their templates. 

Schazam! Instant beautiful website.

A second grade teacher recently sent me an email telling me how happy she was to have a good looking website and blog by using Weebly. Here is a link to her website and you can see how nice it is to see a classroom website that is organized and nice looking. 

We can do this teachers...

NO MORE UGLY CLASSROOM WEBSITES!