USD 411 Web site gets overhaul years ago
By JENNIFER WILSON
News editor
If you visited the Goessel school district's Web site last year, you might have noticed that it was a little out of date.
Now, that's all changed. Thanks to a Web designer and a classroom of budding HTML experts, the USD 411 Web site is undergoing a complete overhaul.
Log onto to the Internet site now — www.usd411.org — and you'll find a wide array of practical information, from the latest basketball scores to your history teacher's e-mail address to the lunch menu for the rest of the month.
Although not every area of the site has been redone, the changes are most noticeable in the junior/senior high and elementary sections.
The new layout and design of the site comes courtesy of Shelly Gilmore, a professional Web designer who works part-time for USD 411.
But much of the updating of the site is done by a small group of students in math teacher Brian Kemling's Computer Applications II class.
Kemling had looked at updating the Web site last year, but it wasn't until this year that his class got the opportunity.
As part of their classwork, the students — Dustin Spoonemore, Jeremy Voth, Chris Voth, and Josh Voth — are learning the "code" of HTML, which is the language used to program pages on the World Wide Web.
Each week, they gather information to keep the pages current — like snagging the lunch menu or calendar events and getting stats from sports coaches.
None of the students had done any Web design before, they said, so learning HTML has been a new experience for them.
And it's sometimes tedious, they said, when you're entering in line after line of code.
But the site doesn't just include school information. It also includes some history about the town of Goessel, which was compiled by faculty member Brian Stucky.
One day, Kemling would also like the Web site to have more information about Goessel's charter school, he said.
He also foresees a day when the class might use more editing software to design the page instead of typing in all the code by hand.
Overall, the page looks much better today, he said.
"It's definitely an improvement," Kemling said.
