Before you enter the site, I wanted to explain a few things about my site and tell you how I think my site excels in each category:

Appropriateness to SF (30 points)
Compared to the current site, my site looks a lot more like it comes from Saint Francis. I use the same font that Saint Francis uses almost everywhere (like the "Dear Judge:" above), and I use Saint Francis colors: brown (the titles) and gold (the background).

Asthetic Design of Site (20 points)
I concentrated a lot on this aspect of the site. I've anti-aliased the logo, title images, and navigational images and made a nice background. On some pages, I've made the first letter of the first paragraph an image, so it is also anti-aliased and looks like Saint Francis's brochures (you'll see what I'm talking about). And even though I have so many images, I've worked hard to reduce the image file sizes so that the site loads quickly.

Navigational Ease of Site (20 points)
This site makes it easy to know where you are because of the navigation bar on the left. There will be a problem getting such pages as the Stock Market Club into this structure because they have many sub-pages and if the navigation bar is nested too much it will be too confusing and too large. However, this can be solved by changing multiple pages such as the Stock Market Club into just a single page; this should be done anyway because none of their subpages contain a lot of content and because it would simplify things a lot. Also, I may have to widen the navigation bar for the whole site if there are some long section names, but this is easy to do.

Ease of Maintainance (20 points)
Though I have all these graphics, it is actually quite easy to update my site. For example, the front page has a "News:" paragraph that tells all the latest news in text paragraph. Also, the explanatory paragraph at the bottom of the front page can be replaced with something else; I just decided to put it there. Photos are easy to replace also. If there is a need to create a new title, I used a very standard font (Arial Narrow) and I can explain how to create consistent titles if my site is chosen (I just don't want to do it now).

Cross-platform/Browser-independance (10 points)
Again, even though my site has many graphics and tables, it is still very easy to view from any browser. It even looks good in Lynx because I've added "Alt:" messages and tested it in Lynx. And even if a browser doesn't understand tables, like Lynx, it will just put the navigation bar first and then below it will put the main content; this is perfectly fine and useable.

Technical Complexity of Site (5 points)
Okay, this is where my site suffers a bit. I do have images and tables, but that's not really that technically complex. I decided not to use java or javascript for several reasons. First of all, many browsers cannot read either. Second, they slow the site down. Third, some javascript features such as rollovers are not really that necessary and are there more for the "neato" effect (though it's not that hard to add rollovers to my site). I just decided to create a clean, simple site and not let java or javascript clutter it up.

Finally, before you enter the site, you should know that the only pages I created are the main page, the athletics page, and the cross country page. These three pages should show how almost any content can fit into my site: there is always the navigation bar, the title image, maybe a photo, and then the text. I plan to have every other page look similar. And, by the way, I've already created the title images for a lot of the pages and would be more than willing to make the rest of the site if my design is chosen. It's a lot of work and I'd probably need some help, but don't worry, I would make sure it would get done.

Sincerely,
Michael Jurka

And now, you can ENTER THE SITE.