📖 Finding Safe and Meaningful Content

You've probably heard people talking about websites saying "Content is king!" It's true, content is king because websites are information repositories. They exist to share content with visitors whether those visitors are part of a limited group of employees or the entire world. The websites you create as part of the Web Development program at Brookhaven College will need interesting and engaging content as well. While many students enroll in web development classes thinking it will be a good opportunity to build a personal page for their family business or a portfolio of themselves, these are generally not good resources for your assignments. Personal content can be difficult to create.

Once you have your site set up you will need to add content. All avatars are famous people or entities and should have a lot of readily available content on the web. In order to avoid having you spend an inordinate amount of time creating content, you should use content from the web related to your avatar. When acquiring content from the web you will have to deal with copyright issues and I expect you to avoid copyright infringement. When considering the use of content we will use these guidelines.

  1. Always look for free and open source materials. A relatively safe repository of usable content is Wikipedia.
  2. Assume content is copyrighted unless you can verify it isn't. Look for copyright policies called Creative Commons Attribution
  3. Be very careful with images. Wikipedia has a list of public domain image sources.
  4. Use advanced Google search for images to find free images. Be sure to set the usage rights to "free to use, share or modify."

Wikipedia has a ton of content written around most of the avatars used in this class and they have a liberal use policy. You should also use the Advances Settings in Google search to find images that are free to use. We want to be considerate of copyrights, but since you are using this content for educational purposes, you should have the protection of free use exception to most copyrights. Following these guidelines should provide you with plenty of content for your site.

If you are still concerned about using copyrighted materials, Brookhaven College provides answers to common copyright questions for students.