Designing the site

Designing a website is not as much of a challenge as it may seem. It is actually fairly easy. These are the steps that went into making this site:

1. Designing the site on paper. We sat down as a group and went through what we wanted the site to look like. We thought about the ideas and feelings that we wanted to get across
- that St. Ann's Academy is old
- that it is a sacred place with many traditions
- that it has been reborn in the last five years with the restoration.

Rough draft on paper

We choose the color scheme, blue and gold to match a book that students used to make in St. Ann's that had a blue cover with gold lettering. We used the image of the cherub (the plaster angel) in the top menu bar and the antique style of font to convey the sense of age.

2. Make a flow chart. The site is large, almost 1000 different files, so we needed early on to really think about where we wanted everything to go. We split the site into three sections, the people of St. Ann's Academy, the building itself with the virtual tour and the visit section which tells about touring the school.

3. Site visit/take digital pictures. We visited St. Ann's early in the project so that we could get a sense of the building and grounds and the history behind it. Then we took pictures. We took hundreds of pictures - both with a regular camera and also with a digital camera. From all these pictures we chose a few of the best ones to display on the site.

pictures of site

4. Scanning. There were lots of old pictures from books and albums that we needed to upload onto the site. To do this we borrowed them from the archives at St. Ann's and used our scanner to scan the picture straight into our computers.

scanner and camera

5. Create a template. After getting our material and deciding what we wanted to do, we made a site template - a navigational bar that would be on every page. Below is our first attempt ...

6. Added content. After we created a template, we filled it with content - lots and lots of content. This came from the researcher and the educational liaison person.

7. Made it look pretty. After the site was filled with content, we added the bells and whistles. We made up some games, put in a whole bunch of images and even added some music.

8. Edit Edit Edit. We did a lot of editing. When you work late into the night, you are bound to make a few mistakes. We made a few mistakes.

edit edit edit

We earned the nickname Sweatshop Boys for all the late hours we spent putting this site together ... but it was worth it.

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