Reflection on completing the final project

Phew!

Well, maybe I should reflect a bit more...

Last year Rye Elementary students had the opportunity to not only join in a community service project to save a local lighthouse, but to learn about its history as well.  White Island Lighthouse and Lighthouse Kids added a new chapter to my local history curriculum that has caught the imaginations of my students and fostered more pride in their hometown.

The time to choose a final project for our Worldwide Web class coincided with the time I started working to create more opportunities for our school and this nonprofit to work together.  Hence, my project to build a new website for Lighthouse Kids was born. Here’s the finished product: http://www.lighthousekidsnh.org/

My other entries here have shed light on my goal and the process, but now that Weebly and I have finished the site, I can see why “Time” magazine rated it one of the 50 best of the year in 2007 after its debut.

A seal sunbathes on the boat winch at White Island.

Using its widget-style format, I was able to create pages with only a few clicks by dragging and dropping different page elements - such as images, text, and a slideshow - onto a page and then filling in the content.

Because building the site is made simple, I was able to concentrate on content, which consisted of editing and consolidating information and photos from the existing Lighthouse Kids website. Working closely with the non-profit’s founder, Sue Reynolds, I was able to design an 11-page site to meet their needs, which the current – and expensive – service they were using, did not.

Sorting through the CDs of old pictures then adding them to iPhoto to touch them up was time-consuming but interesting. There were kinks in this process – for example the pictures where labeled in such a way that iPhoto would not recognize them, so they all had to be re-named, and my iPhoto disc reached capacity in the middle of the process – but everything came together in the end. I decided to use just a handful of those pictures because many of the kids' photos were outdated and images were repetitious. I showcased them via a slideshow format.

Weebly Pros: There were dozens of templates to choose from. Also, Weebly lets you create a standing header, then sample how it would look in some of your favorite page designs – just like trying on a dress before you choose to buy it.

The building blocks of the website, mainly text and photos, could be re-arranged in a snap. Photos were also easily uploaded and resized.

I upgraded to Weebly Pro for 1 year for under $50, giving me the ability to create up to 10 websites, and, most importantly for Lighthouse Kids, eliminating a “Create a free website with Weebly” tagline at the bottom of each page. (If I wasn’t doing this for Lighthouse Kids, I would have lived w/ the tagline – that’s the only advertising on this free site.)

Weebly also provides the ability to add blog pages and e-commerce shopping carts. Lighthouse Kids was not interested in the blog – they want control over all the content at this time - but they would like to develop the shopping cart in the future, selling lighthouse related items to raise funds for its maintenance.

Weebly Cons: Photos can’t be dropped into and wrapped around text. This is a basic need for most page designers, so I can’t figure out the rationale behind it.  Using small chunks of the two-column format is a way to get around that design hurdle, but it requires more steps and breaking up text.

The “Create a free Website…” tagline could seem unprofessional to some.

Even though there are a lot of templates, I’d like to see more page design widgets for greater flexibility, like boxed sidebars, or quarter column design.

Getting published:

Weebly gives you 3 options for domain names. You can pick a sub-domain name. You can register a new domain name. Or, if you already own a domain name, you can configure it to point to their name servers. Lighthouse Kids wanted to see the site up and running before switching over to lighthousekids.com, so I bought the domain name lighthousekidsnh.org through Weebly, which was pricy, $40 a year, but I bit the bullet for the sake of getting it done, and keeping everything in the Weebly world for now.

The Powers That Be at Weebly told me it could take up to two weeks for Google to recognize my domain name, so to amp that up I followed their search engine recognition advice at http://kb.weebly.com/webmaster-tools.html. Now it should just be a matter of days.

My students will be using this site as part of a WebQuest in the near future and I’m hoping they find it easy to navigate and pleasant on the eye. I also hope it feeds into their sense of responsibility to preserve the elements of their community that make it special.