A goal of some freshman writing courses is to teach students to write effectively for the Web and to design websites that use both text and visual elements to convey information. Do community-based websites provide a good context for students to learn how to write and design for the Web? A website that promotes a community organization or delivers information to a specific group of people in a community has a fairly narrowly defined sense of purpose and audience. An assignment that clearly delimits the audience and purpose of a website may help students make more effective writing and design choices. Knowing that their site needs to accomplish a specific goal with a specific group of readers, students may be more likely to craft the style and organization of their writing in a manner that works well on the Web, and they may be more likely as well to select appropriate images, colors, page layouts, and navigation strategies.

An example of a Web writing assignment that, I hope, achieves these goals is one that I gave students in my Writing 50E course in the Winter 2002 quarter at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This freshman-level writing course is designed for engineering majors, and as the capstone project of the course I assign a collaboratively-written website. One element of writing for the Web that my assignments in previous courses had neglected was the importance of creating a site that is useful for a specific audience. Rather than simply posting nicely designed and informative sites on the Web, I wanted my students to create sites that filled a need in the local community.

The assignment in my Winter 2002 section of this course asked students to work collaboratively in redesigning a website for UCSB's Community Affairs Board (CAB). This is a student-run organization that coordinates volunteering activities in the local community and on campus. The existing website for the organization had a rich database of volunteering positions, but the rest of the site contained very little information and its navigation was confusing. In redesigning the site, my students were well aware that its primary audience is other UCSB students and that its purpose is to promote volunteering and to inform students of CAB's services and events.

The focus of the course was on the design and content of the website; almost all of the writing assignments (both print- and Web-based) and many of the reading assignments were intended to help students understand the principles of effective Web writing and design. Six groups of students worked on the same project with essentially the same materials available to them. The challenge was to take those materials—informational literature about CAB and about community service, photographs, and information that they themselves generated from interviews and other research—and present them on the Web as effectively as possible, given the site's audience and purpose. While most of the groups used similar categories to organize this information, the use of color and graphics varied considerably from group to group, as did their choices in page layout and navigation strategies. When students saw the differences in the content and design produced by each group and when they were asked themselves to articulate the reasons for the choices they made, I think they came to understand how audience and purpose shape communication on the Web; learning this was a key goal of the course.