Friday, September 22, 2006
Yesterday was my deadline for prepping the material for my next Information Architecture course for the Faculty of Information Sciences at the University of Toronto. What I have found from previous classes is that there are usually students who have problems with the school's own ftp site for downloading course materials, and usually I have to set up a directory on one of my Web sites for them to grab material from.
So I decided to simply register another domain and point my students to that instead. I would have liked to get the informal name "InfoArch.com" or the .net or .org variants of the same, but they were already taken. "InformationArchitectureCourse.com" was available, but the longer the name, the more likely spelling errors are likely to creep in. So I ended up registering "InfoArchCourse.com", put up the necessary files the school needed, and whipped together something simple, using a pre-existing CSS template I ran across that I liked.
I have to hand it to BlueHost, in that they make the process easy -- certainly easier than my previous web host provider did. Registering is quick and painless (and relatively cheap at $10 U.S. a pop), and then parking the new domain to an existing one (in this case it is linked to a subdirectory of this blog site) is accomplished in a few easy steps.
At this point my ambitions for the site are modest and largely functional: a place where my students can easily find and download materials relating to the course, which so far are contained within a couple of encrypted zip files. There is also some basic promotional materials relating to the course, and I've taken a stab at adding the sites I reference in the course, and that's about it. The text content is derived largely from what's on the equivalent FIS site describing the course, cobbled together in haste last night after putting the kids to bed.
At the moment the site is a far cry from what I would say would be an ideally constructed site based on Information Architecture principles, so I have my work cut out for me.
Not much to see as yet, but it's there and functional, which is all I need at this stage.
Labels: BlueHost, CSS, domain, Faculty of Information Sciences, InfoArchCourse.com, Information Architecture, University of Toronto, web site
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