Site Report
Purpose
Culture Shock BSU is a website that is focusing on the different
experiences that students go through in order to adjust to the
climate and culture in Bemidji, and possible solution in adjusting
to this different culture.
Our audience is current and prospective international student and
American students who have all had different experiences at BSU.
We therefore have designed this website to share our experiences
and try to help one another and prepare those students who intend
to join BSU and especially the international students.
BSU is far up north of USA and has its own unique culture and climate,
which may not have been addressed adequately in other websites
on similar subject.
How It Is Designed
Our site has 9 pages, 7 dealing with the various areas with problems
that students in BSU are likely to experience. These are food,
weather, study, jobs, shopping, transportation and entertainment.
These pages have pictures and comments on the difficulties that
the students maybe having and also tips on how to manage this problems.
These links to the seven pages appear on the left of the page and
below them we have relative links to various sites dealing with
similar topic. The header and footer are made up of links to Home
(the homepage), About us and Contact us. This layout is consistent
to all our pages in this website with a colorful banner.
Design and Text Composition
Following what we learnt this semester on site design, we tried
to make our headers and footers as consistent as possible, so that
people who visit this site do not have to scroll up each time when
they want to go back to the home page. We also designed our links
on the left side in a way that they change color whenever they
have been visited.
We also took photographs from various spots in Bemidji to enhance
our topics and also to add some aesthetics to our pages.
We had earlier decided to give subtitles on the right to the topics
written their individual pages, but we later change it because
it looked redundant. We thought of having the same subtopics appearing
as dropdown menu whenever one visits the page. However, because
of the technology problems, we were not able to do this and then
ended up just writing them against the link.
We also kept the banner
on “Culture Shock BSU” consistent
in all the pages for credibility.
Our links to various
pages in the website appear in all pages, so one doesn’t
need to go back to the home page in order
to connect
to
another
page, but instead go
directly
from whatever
page he is in.
Some changes that we made were at the beginning. We had an 8th
topic which was technology, but we later decided to merge it with
study because it was talking about computers and that we saw, is
related to study. Therefore, we decided to reduce our topics to
seven
Problems
Our biggest problem
was that of lack of enough knowledge to be able to apply the
technology. Many times we found ourselves stuck,
not being able to create or delete tables and
cells because we were not proficient on it. This was so frustrating
because we spent
so much time on one item just to realize much
later that the problem was very small. Other than the technological
problems there were a few problems
concerning the design. Mainly trying to agree on which colors to
use and where to put the list for the anchored links. Before, we
had the list in a separate column on the right then decided to
put it in the right navigation bar.
Who did what
When it came to taking photographs to use on our site, Jing did
that because she has a digital camera. Jing and Mary wrote their
views on the differences they encountered in America for the:
Food, Weather and Study pages on our website. The wrote their
first hand experiences on dealing with these differences. Mary
also wrote about her first hand experience in dealing with finding
a Job and also her experiences when it came to shopping. Jamie
wrote about transportation in Bemidji and also gathered information
on Bemidij entertainment as well as doing the typing for the
website.
