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 Ratings
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| Reviewed: |
Mar 17, 2003 by Information Technology Editorial Board |
| Overview: |
This Eborcom site (http://www.eborcom.com/webmaker/) is an organized collection
of annotated links pertaining to the creation and design of web pages.
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| Learning Goals: |
This website makes the following claim: "The Web Development Resources list will
enable you to quickly and easily locate relevant information to help you
improve your web site, both for reference purposes or to introduce you to new
technologies."
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| Target Student Population: |
The Eborcom Web Development Resources site is aimed at a general audience. It
has links to information useful to beginners and those with some familiarity
with web page creation and HTML.
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| Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills: |
Appropriate for beginners, but may have information of value for more advanced
web developers, too.
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| Type of Material: |
Reference material, with several pages of well-organized links.
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| Recommended Uses: |
Were it not for several problems (see review comments below) this site might be
a useful supplement for an introductory class on web page development and
design. It places a lot of demand on the user to follow links and pull together
information from them, so it would at best provide ancillary material to more
organized/guided instruction.
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| Technical Requirements: |
None.
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| Strengths: |
The content is generally relevant to the stated purpose of the web site. Since
this is primarily a reference site, the organization of links is important. The
author(s) have done an excellent job grouping links together in logical,
well-labeled categories. Many links (those that work, anyway) are excellent
resources worthy of bookmarking.
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| Concerns: |
The content is woefully out of date. There is no mention of newer web
developments (e.g., XML) and many of the links are broken. On some pages, more
than 50% of the links yield "page not found" errors. Although much of the
content that is still active is excellent, the user must wade through a lot to
get to it. Also, the annotations are a bit sparing and in some cases,
misleading. For example, in a section dealing with graphics, there is a link to
Adobe Photoshop. It is not clear from the annotation that this is merely a link
to the Adobe web site for purchase of Photoshop; it is not a link to any
instructional material. Overall, it is very important to focus only on sites
that provide free information, and to explicitly identify websites that require
a purchase appropriately (so readers are forewarned adequately).
This website has several categories of materials, and within any given category,
it only presents a few links (and acknowledges that other links exist that are
not presented in this website). No information is provided on the criteria, if
any, that were used to justify the focus on the websites whose urls are
provided, and why other websites were ignored.
There is no consistency in the quality of websites that are linked to this site
(some are very simple and easy to follow,
others are difficult to follow). For
each category, it would help if the author(s) identify websites that are
appropriate for beginners, intermediate, and advanced users.
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Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool |
Rating:   |
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| Strengths: |
Many of the links are great for learning about web development and associated
topics. Without assistance, though, most students would probably flounder in
trying to integrate information from different sources with different levels of
technical sophistication.
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| Concerns: |
Users of this information are pretty much left to their own devices to pull
information together across the linked sites. Given the pace of technological
advance in web development, it is important for the author(s) to review this
site every three months to remove/replace bad links. We suspect that such
?housekeeping? functions have not been carried out recently.
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Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty |
| Rating: |
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| Strengths: |
The site is pretty straightforward in its design: it is comprised of several
pages of well-organized links. The lack of graphics (except on some of the
linked pages) would make it useful even for persons on a dialup line.
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| Concerns: |
The number of dead links would quickly frustrate all but the most devoted
learner. The datedness of the site ("new languages such as Java") would also
make it even more difficult for students to evaluate the usefulness of newer web
technologies in relation to HTML.
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| Other Issues and Comments: |
Quite a few of the linked sites open popup/pop-under ads. Very annoying.
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