To start, I looked at the “Into the Woods” site that produced by University of Mary Washington students, Maureen Sullivan and Sarah Kinzer.

I have to say, that I quite like the aesthetic of the site, as it seems very professional looking. The menu bar is very clean, and the pages themselves have a good mixture of links, images, and quotes.

I feel like the structure and professional look of the site indicates that the students did a great deal of research and were definitely enthusiastic about the work they did.

That being said, the pages seem to be a bit short. Between the somewhat short pages and the great quantity, it feels like maybe some of the pages were separated just to fill out the site. Further inspection shows that each page is still quality work, but the impression of ‘quantity over quality’ is still there.

Second, I looked at the “Morning Sun Community” site created by the students from Keene State University, Miles Duhamel and Savannah Robert.

Right off the bat, this site seems to be the opposite of the UMW site for this course.

Each of the pages are filled with text, with almost no images or links to actually draw away from the paragraph after paragraph of type. I can definitely appreciate the work that went into typing up these lengthy pages and the various citations therein.

Additionally, they included a separate page where they have short biographies for themselves and what their perspective on the course was. This seems particularly interesting as it offers an opportunity for the students to actually provide an insight into the perspective of those that created the site.

What looking at these sites tells me, is that our site definitely needs images and hyperlinks to break up the monotony of a wall of text. However, we should not let the various effects and images overshadow the text itself.

Additionally, personalizing our site a bit more to offer viewers a chance to understand our perspectives on our choices could prove useful.