Welcome to Our New Web Site

Schools Zone Web Site Development Plan

About This Document

Current Version: 22 December, 2004
Changes:
- Fixed typo errors identified on or before 08 September 2004.
- Added document revision history.
First Published: 01 September, 2004
Submitted By: Elaine Xavier, Co-Founder of Schools Zone

Why Build a New Web

We have taken the opportunity of the recent quiet summer holidays to revamp all of our web sites. This is not a simple face-lifted exercise. The original Schools Zone web site has been around for 6 years and its structure has become quite complicated and difficult to maintain. We have received many complaints from teachers and parents telling us that they could not find the information they need.

Project Objectives

The objectives of this redesign project are:

Make it easy for all users to locate the information they need.
Publish all materials in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese for the convenience of all users.
Create a separate sub web for each major project. Publish a direct link to the sub web, so teachers and students who need to access it daily could set the sub-web address as the default link in their browsers.
Make our new web sites in compliance with international standards and accessibility requirements.
Use multimedia only when there is a need.

New Web Structure

It will probably take us a year to get all the information we need onto this new site as we found that it is quite difficult to convert our old web pages to this new design. In the old web site we use a lot of invisible tables to create the layout we want. However, in this new site we use primarily Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The biggest change we have made architecturally, and also organizationally is the decision to spin off part of our web information and also our activities into two separate units - Lifelong Learning Community (L3C) and User Groups Central. Therefore, we now have three main web sites, namely:

Schools Zone
Lifelong Learning Community
User Groups Central

Creative Digital Art Classroom (CDAC) Sub Web

We will use the same design as this one for all Schools Zone sub webs. The only difference is the head banner, which will bear the name of the individual sub web. As the effort to convert all old CDAC materials to the new CDAC site is huge, we could only handle it through multiple phases. You can access the new CDAC site from the following links or using the link bar on the left of this page:

Default (English) - art.schoolszone.org
English - art.en.schoolszone.org
Simplified Chinese - art.cs.schoolszone.org
Traditional Chinese - art.ct.schoolszone.org

Please note that the above sub webs do not contain our new online course materials, which are part of our e-Learning Project. To use these online materials you need a SCORM-compliant e-learning system like Blackboard or WebCT. For more information please contact the CDAC Working Group (cdac@schoolszone.org).

Lifelong Learning Community (L3C)

We found that the following web sites are frequently visited by corporate executives, small business owners, professionals, office workers and others who want to improve their knowledge even though they do not participate in other Schools Zone activities. To reduce the financial burden of Schools Zone we have decided to set up a new NGO, called Lifelong Learning Community (L3C) as an umbrella organization for these sites. They include:

BeyondCert
Reader's Home (Book Reviews)
The Road to Success

We are inviting Schools Zone members and people interested in this project to join the L3C Working Group. They will come up with a draft of the operating guidelines and will publish it on the L3C main web (www.l3c.org) for public's comment and review.

We hope L3C will eventually become self-financed.

User Groups Central

For similar reasons we are relocating all user group web sites including the highly popular Macromedia User Group (SuperMMUG) to their own servers. We are planning to set up another NGO to manage these user groups when we see some successful results from the L3C project.

More Information

For Teachers : "info" at "schoolszone.org"
For Press : "press" at "schoolszone.org"

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