Examples of Good and Bad Web Pages

East Grand Rapids Middle School students in the Multimedia Presentations class are going to be designing their own Web pages. Today, I am showing them examples of both good and bad sites. First, the bad sites:

World's Worst Website

Jim Jacobson
Dani's Pet Bird Care
Larvalbug's Home Page


Now, for the good sites:

Project JUICE (designed by a 16 year old in New Zealand)
Animals in Danger (designed by an 8 year old)
Tim Lahan (Commercial site, but good design)
Best Designs (gallery of pages that demonstrate well-designed pages)

Scholarly vs. Non-Scholarly Resources

Here is an excellent chart showing the difference between scholarly and non-scholarly research. Many thanks to the library staff at the Springfield Township High School Virtual Library for creating this!

Research Sources

MEL (Michigan Electronic Library) is an excellent research source. It has a variety of databases, which are collections of articles from journals, magazines, newspapers, books, and transcripts from all over the world! Some of the databases focus on a specific subject, like law or medicine, but most cover millions of topics. I recommend these:

Academic One File
Expanded Academic ASAP
General Reference Center Gold
Infotrac Custom Newspapers

You can log on to mel.org, click on "see databases from library" (in middle), and then choose from the many databases in the list.

You can use MEL from home, but have to enter a Michigan driver's license number or state identification number because Michigan tax dollars provide access to these resources. Your information will be encoded and not used in any way, so it's very safe.

Log on to MEL sometime and just look around; you'll be amazed at what you'll find!