Teaching Web page design: challenges and opportunities

This paper describes a research project in which a semester-long, tertiary course was developed to teach students how to design home pages for the World Wide Web. The course outcome was a series of Web pages produced for clients from the public and private sector. Students conducted a needs analysis which showed that, in many cases, clients were keen to develop a presence on the Web because of external, competitive factors, rather than a perceived organisational need. Few clients knew the target audience they were trying to reach and design options were conservative, or governed by designs already seen on the Web. It appears that Web page design is very much technology driven, rather than user-driven and this presents real challenges and opportunities for HCI designers.