Are you an old Internet hand? Old enough to remember laughing at Bud Uglly years ago? It was a spoof of all the horrible design mistakes made on web sites: the Onion of web design.
Bud Uglly is still around. I just found it. But we don’t need it so much these days to get a good laugh. Now we have MySpace. We have all the horrors of the bad old days: nested tables, unreadable color combinations, overwhelming backgrounds. And we have students coming into our classes who are pros at using MySpace and think it’s a top-notch way to communicate and a fun place to visit. They’ve made their own sites there and feel they’re creating web pages as a result. Well, they actually are creating web pages. The problem is the things they learned from the experience. The habits, the frame of reference, they have for what a web page is and how it’s put together. They may know some useful things you can build on, but they may have some ideas that need revamping. The challenges of teaching remain interesting.