by Tara Maginnis, Ph.D. of The University of Alaska Fairbanks
This site soon to be hosted by my new underwriter onlinecostumestore.com!

Accessories
Book & Gift Store
Classes at UAF
Corsets & Underwear
Computers
Costumes 4 Sale
Costume e-Lists
Dance Costumes
Designs & Designers
Dolls
"Ethnic" Dress
Fashion Theory
Free eGroup
Free Stuff
Halloween
(Costume) History
How-To
Kinky Clothing
Major Sites
Military Uniforms
Movie Costumes
Museums
New Pages
Occupational & Occasion- Specific
Patterns
Questions?
Religious Dress
Site Sponsorship 
Theatre History
Theatre UAF Studio
Travel for Costumers
Unite!
Vintage Clothing
Weddings
Weird Clothing

Tara's Cheap Tricks (For Faculty Web Page Design)

Making your site useful not only to students from your class, but to anybody at any university in your field.

• Include links to related sites. The item most suggested by students to make a site useful is that it points one towards more information on related matters. To make a links page quickly, use your Netscape bookmark file to make a list of sites.

• Include a search engine in any links page. You can get a free search engine, or stock ticker, or local weather "window" from Yahoo to Go, which will allow you to copy a little code into your page that lets people do searches, or see information right from your site. You can also get search boxes from Google: 

• Include actual content. Syllabi online, lesson plans, and internal documents for your classes are only interesting to your students. However, if you have written articles, or part of a book that you normally copy for your students, copy it to the web. If you have taken photos that you show in class, scan them & put them on your site. Working on your dissertation and want feedback from fellow researchers in your field? Put your work completed so far out on the web. Lecture notes, bibliographies, and recommended links are also useful.

• Include primary research materials unavailable elsewhere. If you have access to historical materials like letters, photos, etc. that are one-of-a-kind, and waiting for a researcher to work on them you can attract those researchers to your institution by letting them preview those materials online. The University of Georgia Paris Music Hall Collection site, and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco site are two great examples of web research sites that show the attraction of putting your collection online.

• Give away free stuff. If you are a computer science department, give out little freeware programs that do useful tasks. If you are an art department give out an artwork screensaver, web page backgrounds or e-mail greeting cards. If you are a biology department, make some downloadable or printable graphics on typical HS science projects that students can use for class reports. A music department or film studies department can make audio and video files for download. I, myself give away web page backgrounds on costume themes (I teach costume design) to lure costumers to my site.

• Make a default page for browsers used by people in your discipline. My main page of my site is designed to be this type of page for use in costume shops so it includes a Google search engine plus a variety of links pages for costume topics and supplies. A default page is the page that first comes up when you start up your browser. You can put ANY web page into the settings of your browser to be the first one that launches. So, if you make a page that is the most useful search and links site for say, a music library, you can expect that several music libraries across the US will set their browsers straight into your page.

• Connect to sites useful to all college students and faculty, regardless of discipline. Sites like FinAid, the Financial Aid Information Page

• Convince students that there will be fun extracurricular stuff to do in your small college town by making a local activities link page, or a local information page.  Once students get to your school, this page will continue to be useful for them for checking weather, movie times, and local events, so it will encourage them to repeatedly visit your page.  You can then use this page to continually make sure students know of upcoming activities or local resources you want them to be aware of.