RodeWorks

I’ve been running a series of workshops on basic web page design and creation with a group of students here at the Drama School, a topic that has been a staple of my teaching over the last 6 years.  But for this session I’ve taken a very different approach, and I find that I’m liking it.

The big shift has been to re-orient the class to a Web 2.0 perspective.  In our first class we talked about the benefits of a blog software approach to web design, and using wordpress.com to set up simple web pages.  Our class discussion also included experiments with RSS feeds utilizing bloglines, and a quick introduction to flickr .

Especially when considering student portfolios, the time required to design and maintain a traditional web site is considerable.  There is a pretty steep learning curve, they tend to either focus a lot of the look (to the detriment of the content) or the content (to the detriment of the look) and ultimately end up with something that is difficult to update and maintain.  Their lives are changing constantly, and the portfolio is really best when it reflects their most recent thoughts, projects and work.

With blog software you can focus on the content, and you get to reuse that content in so many ways.  From a single posting you update your main blog page, the recent posts listing, the archive listing, an rss/atom feed, a permalink page and other elements of your web site.   The navigation elements, search elements, and other components come along automatically.  In the traditional web site all of this had to be handled individually.  Sure Dreamweaver templates, javascript, css style sheets and other stuff can help with the management but they require a lot of work themselves.

It seems to me that a traditional web site design process has a lot in common with the traditional print design process.  The end products are different, but the steps along in the process are very similar.  And both require a significant investment of time and resources to produce a quality end product.  In contrast a blog-centric design process is more personal, more responsive to changes, can more easily be kept current, and really takes advantage of the possibilities of the web.  As I’ve been working on design projects over the last year, I’ve been getting more and more dissatisfied with the old way of doing things.  I think I may be ready for a full web 2.0 immersion.