Search form

The Results of the Education World
Survey and Contest!

Here are the winners' suggestions arranged by keywords:

Color Coding and Promoting the Site to New Teachers

"When I begin to create a new unit for my seventh-grade language arts classroom, EdWorld is the first place I go.

"I love all of the colors on the Web site; however, they could be utilized more effectively if the colors were used to color code the different areas.

"I wonder if there would be some flyer or e-mail or something to send to prospective or new teachers in order to let them know about this wonderful resource."

-- Sheena Roller
Lexington, KY

Dear Sheena,

Of course, our home page presents our major content channels in a color code -- Lesson Planning (blue), Professional Development (red), the Administrator's Desk (orange), Technology Integration (green), and School Issues (yellow). Taking that color code deeper into the site is an idea that makes a lot of sense. But let us share a little Education World background with you to explain why it's going to take us some time to color code the whole site…

Education World is one of the original comprehensive Web sites for educators. Our site contains literally tens of thousands of pages. These are called "static HTML" pages, and the good thing about them is that they have "permanent" URLs, or Web addresses.

You might have noticed that the pages on many large Web sites kind of "slip," and the link you may have bookmarked one week no longer leads to that page the week after. That's because those sites are built on databases that deliver pages dynamically. The good thing about that kind of Web site is that universal changes, like a color-coding system, can be implemented simply by changing the code that presents the physical appearance of the whole site.

In our case, however, to really change how all our pages look, we'd have to go back and change code on each of our tens of thousands of pages of content.

For those of you who are very technical, you'll see that we're oversimplifying here, but the basic point is this: We do intend to migrate Education World over to a database-driven platform, but at the same time we don't want to lose the kind of stability that we've achieved with static HTML pages.

It's a big problem for a small team, but we're working on it!

Meanwhile, as for a flyer, hey, help us get the word out about Education World! Our advertising budget is small. (Our feeling is that, by investing monies that might be spent on advertising in additional content instead, dedicated teachers will find us and spread the word.) The best flyer or promotion we could have is the kind word you might share with colleagues in your school, district, state… Thank you!

~ The Editorial Team at www.EducationWorld.com, "The Educator's Best Friend"