Background
E-rates and technology initiatives are connecting our schools to the Internet resulting in a number of school published sites. I chose to compare two high schoolsí web sites: South Burlington High School and The Putney School.
The home pages tell us that South Burlington High School is a public 9-12 institution serving the communities of South Burlington, Vermont and many nearby towns. Itís a comprehensive high school, offering a wide variety of educational programs that are open to all enrolled students. The Putney School, located in southern Vermont, is an independent, coeducational boarding and day school with 196 students in grades 9-12. Founded in 1935, the school has pioneered coeducation, recognition of the arts as an academic discipline.
Content
Both have home pages that offer a table of contents to the site and general information about the school
 
 

Both include a photograph and white background although the South Burlington graphic has been customized and also serves as an image map and contents to the site. The South Burlington picture is on the large size (80K) for people accessing with 14K modems and slower. The last edited date is available so we know how recently the information has been updated. The table of contents allows access to information about the schoolís departments, news, and school projects. Missing from the first page is the schoolís address, phone and principal.

The Putney Schoolís home page offers a different picture each time the page is refreshed. I did this at least 15 times before I started seeing the same photographs. The pictures show school teams, concerts, activities, projects, and feature student art. For those people with slower connections and text only access, an alt label provides a short description in lieu of picture. The photographs are a good size, variety, and quality. Missing is the date this site was last edited, but school address, phone # and admission
nformation are available.
Beyond the home page one can find similar information about both schools: athletic events, course syllabi, school calendars, course requirements, student work and a spattering of faculty and student home pages.

Navigation
Both sites provide clearly labeled tables of content on the home page but on the South Burlington site the athletic information page and social studies page have no internal links and one must use the back button of the browser to return to the home page. I also found that when I clicked home on the administrator page, I ended up on the same page, not the home page. There are links back to the home page on all the Putney site pages, but the link takes different forms, sometimes a picture, sometimes a button, sometimes just text, and is located in different places on the pages.

Mood
Both home pages look organized and crisp. The changing pictures in the Putney School show many students engaged in different activities creating the impression that this is a classy private county school. Pictures depict students horse-back riding, attending brunch jazz concerts, cross country skiing, and participating in camping trips.
The South Burlington site presents a more sophisticated school with its customized image map and java driven page. Links to an online school newspaper and award winning imaging lab, reinforce that impression.
 

  Design
Both homepages offer school photos and linkable table of contents to bring us right into each building. Beyond the home pages however, both sites lack coherence. It appears that these sites have evolved as
teachers serendipitously created departmental and class pages reproducing a gamut of techniques, styles, and abilities, making the sites in general, appear disconnected and amateurish. Although I believe student and teacher pages should allow individuality, some greater general coherence should tie the sites together, especially at the departmental levels. These difference can be demonstrated by comparing the South Burlington image media lab page above that presents a slick, professional, contemporary, look with the English department page that has simply formatted text to describe its curriculum.

Perhaps these schools could use a common banner or graphic to identify the institution and a check off list of general criteria for each page like a link to the departmental and homepage. Schools might also consider providing a template for teachers to plug in their information until the ability to publish on the net is as commonplace as wordprocessing.