Site Report

By Katie, Erin, and Josh

Purpose

Do Bemidji, is a reference site for entertainment and recreational activities in the Bemidji area. More specifically, it’s geared towards BSU students in the 18-25 year old age group. Many college students are new to the area and never hear of all the activities there are for them in Bemidji. This site is a compilation of all the information we wished we would have known as freshman.

Design

It’s designed to be an easy reference site. The home page gives a brief intro to Bemidji and the site itself. We wanted to keep the design very simple. All the links are placed in the left column on each page. Each page gives a brief overview of the various activities and relative links (when available). Because it is a reference guide and is designed to be quick and easy all the information is only one click away from the main page. The categories are all on the left navigation bar so that the user can go to the page that interests them and not have to search for what they want.

Decisions

Our biggest design decision was where to place the information. Our initial idea was to split the information into two groups, entertainment and recreation. Then we would have subdivided the information into seasons; winter, spring, summer and fall. However, when we were getting the information in the pages a lot applied to many seasons and we didn’t want to have the same information repeated on several pages. So, we decided to ditch that idea and chose the set up we have now which is; the home page and then separate pages for the following categories; schedule of events, theatre & fine arts, parks & trails, indoor recreation, hunting & fishing and sports.

Our biggest text decision was, what to include in the text. Although, Bemidji isn’t a huge metropolitan city, there is a lot of entertainment and recreational activities available. We had to decide what to include and what to leave out. We chose to include the biggest attractions to provide answers to questions students might have, such as; where’s the movie theatre, is there a ski lodge and is there a gym where I can blow off steam during finals week?

Problems

Our group had one major problem, we lost our focus. We had the intentions of making the site geared towards college age students, but when we went to give our presentation we figured out that that wasn't what we had done. Our first page along with some of the others was geared for the tourists. Basically, it was an add for Bemidji, which wasn't what we had intended. In order to fix this we had to go back and revise all of our pages. This was difficult because it caused the order on each page to be slightly different and in some cases not to make sense. Also, this took a ton of time so we were in a hurry to get done. In making a web site you don't want to be rushed.

We had trouble in the beginning getting all our pages to link together, but we eventually figured it out with the help of a classmate. Another problem that we had was fixing the spacing on each page. After we had put our banner on every page there was a space beneath it that didn't want to go away. We played with it enough that we eventually figured it out. We also tended to put too many spaces on each page.

We didn't have the best time management skills. Either people were late or we couldn't get in the classroom when we had planned or we didn't have enough sources to work with. We went out to take photos of Bemidji which was not hard but it took time and also took time for the photos to get developed before we could scan them in. So for the first couple classes we didn't have the photos to work with and had to focus just on the text and content of the pages. When we did get the pictures that we wanted we had trouble making our banner. Our plan was to have the banner fade to white on the top right side so that we could place a photo there. It didn't work so we had to use the banner without a photo at all which was kind of a bummer. We also have quite a few links on our pages which took time in finding and then deciding which ones we thought were worthy of adding to our site.

Related Sites

Each of the three Bemidji Sites gave us extra background information that we needed to fulfill the Do Bemidji sites purpose, that purpose being highlighting things to do in Bemidji.

bemidji.org

The Chamber of Commerce site for Bemidji helped us in great detail in providing us with the calendar of events. With this helpful tool we were able to look back at previous years, and look at what has been posted for next years events simply by clicking on the year, month, and then day. Some events that did not provided us with enough information, and or not currently have information let us decide to post a link to bemidji.org so that visitors to our site can simply click the link and go to the direct source of the events calendar and receive more current and detailed information. The Chambers site also provides more historical and other types of information for further research into Bemidji. Something we did not enjoy about the Chamber of Commerce’s site was that it took a couple clicks and pages to get to the information you wanted to see. Since we didn't’t like that we decided to put all of our pages no more than on page from our home page.

visitbemidji.com

Visit Bemidji is a site that provided us with more information and guidance on what needed to be covered in the Do Bemidji web site. The information at visitbemidji.com focused on specific and actual events and things to do while one visits Bemidji. Unlike the Chamber of Commerce’s web site this one is more commercial. Within this site it was split into two seasons, Summer and Winter. The visit Bemidji site had their navigation bar on the left hand side. We found this very convenient so we adopted that idea for our own site. We also liked the lay out of visitbemidji.com and we model our site after that.

ci.bemidji.mn.us

This site is nothing more than the City of Bemidji’s government site. While this information is interesting it was not information that was focused on within our site. We did link this site to Do Bemidji simply because its Bemidji’s official site.

Dividing the Work

Our group worked well together when we were all there. We all worked together on all the aspects of building the site. We decided to divide up the pages that each of us would do. Josh took care of the Intro and Schedule of Events page. Erin did the Hunting and Fishing and the Parks and Trails page. Katie did the rest and also took the majority of the photos on our site. We all worked on the construction of the site. We put in our own pages and our own links. After our presentation we all worked on the intro page so that we didn't lose sight of our focus. Katie and Erin did most of the editing of the site, and a lot of the busy work. Overall, it was a good group effort.