conclusion

This, effectively, is the end of the site.... thanks for your time and hope it has been of some use!

Remember that course works, whether for the Web Design Core or Advanced Web Techniques, are published on the main ACOM site.

If I could boil my feelings about good web design into one sentence (with two clauses), it'd be: "Don't get hung up on technicalities and don't forget that your web sites are designed to be read by others". The printed booklet for Web Design discussed the possible political and social consequences of allowing the World Wide Web to become nothing more than a shopping mall and/or home for the bigoted and insular, and while you might think that your little, insignificant site is a drop in the ocean, who knows? Tell enough people about it, register it with search engines, contact the owners of sites on similar themes to trade links, and have patience. It might take a while but good, helpful, well-written sites will be seen. Don't underestimate yourself! One of the best-known satirical web sites, The Onion, started as a personal site, and is now known worldwide. Why not yours?

I know that there will be students who now they have reached this point (if they ever do) and submit their course work and say, "right, that's it, 10 credits done" and will never design another web page as long as they live. That will, of course, be a shame, but I know it happens. However I stand by my statement in the lectures that everyone can, and should, know how to write at least a basic web page. "Cyberspace", whatever the hell that term means exactly, belongs to all of us. It has to, for it is an integral part of the world we live in and in which we have to make the best life we can. If a fundamental arena for self-expression is denied to us simply because we have never learnt - or forget - what are, essentially, fairly simple skills then an increasingly important slice of the world is simply not available to us as active citizens.

Of course just because the basic web design skills are fairly easy, doesn't mean that writing excellent web pages is a doddle. Just as it's easy to pick up a paintbrush but hard to create "art", so there will be people who know all the skills but when they try and put them into practice, come up with stuff that they consider only "average". But I say again that it's not your HTML skills, or graphic design skills, that make for a good site - these will often give the appearance of gloss to something lacking in substance, but that's all it is, just gloss. The main impact of a web site comes when it tells a reader something they didn't already know. And almost everyone has something to say that is different, unusual or interesting - including you! Yes, you!

So let's get out there and really use the Web, and do our best to stop it turning into only the province of "professionals", corporations, criminals and pornographers. Let's stake a claim in the online territory and fight our corner, get our words heard. This site will remain here, if you want to use it as a reference in the future - but for now, I will bid you goodbye.

That's it... I'm done. Cheers...

Drew: 2004.

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