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The Next RRE Project: Instructive Web Sites

``` I am about to teach an introductory class on Web design. Web design has evolved rapidly over the last year, and it is possible to find both good and bad sites that range anywhere from simple HTML code to gnarly Java extravaganzas. Students can find a web site instructive if it exemplifies a useful idea about Web design, either by doing something well or by doing something badly. To help my students, and everyone else's, I want to assemble an annotated Web page of Instructive Web Sites.

PLEASE, therefore, send me a nomination. Something simple -- a URL and a few lines of text about why you regard it as instructive. Give these lines of text some thought; try to refine them to a single point that students need to see for themselves. The point is not to collect famous sites, or even important sites, just sites that provide clearly defined models, good and bad, for students. Include the software requirements (has text-only mode, requires Netscape 2.0, requires Java, etc). I will check out all the nominees -- at least the ones for which I have the necessary technical abilities. Then I will assemble most of the nominees into an orderly -- and hopefully well-designed -- Web page, whose URL I will gratefully broadcast to the list.

I will include your name and e-mail address as the nominee unless you specifically ask me not to. You'll sleep better if you don't nominate anything for which you have a conflict of interest -- e.g., your own company's Web site, or your spouse's, or whatever.

My personal dogma is that the foundation of good Web design is rational thinking about how the Web site fits into people's lives -- that is, into the lives of both its intended users and its intended maintainers. Since people can use and maintain Web sites in very different ways, it probably follows that a humongous variety of different designs can be "good" for different purposes, and that a good site for one purpose can be a disaster for other purposes. But that's just my dogma. If you have other ways of thinking about good design, by all means send me an exemplar and an explanation for the page.

Thanks very much.

Phil ```

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