Women in web design:Group learns male dominated trade

Seven women gathered in a Curry Health Center conference room last night to discuss coding not the kind that deals with medicine, but the kind that deals with computer programming.Women for the Web is a group that was created for women of all ages to learn how to create and design websites. Morgan Stier Slemberger, a University of Montana alumna with a degree in media arts, founded the group in 2008 with June Noel, a senior who designs websites for several university groups, including the University Center and Greek Life.

After taking a year long hiatus last year, the women are diving back into the world of collaborative web design.Slemberger said she created the group in the hopes of encouraging other women to get interested and hone their web designing skills.It's a forum for women to learn in the male-dominated world of programming, she said.The women will work together to design websites for nonprofits in the Missoula area. Their first project is a website for The Girl's Way, a nonprofit geared toward creating extra-curricular activities for 10- to 18-year-old girls.

Designing a site will hopefully be a full lesson plan and a collaborative effort with an awesome final result,Slemberger said.UC marketing coordinator Gwen Landquist attended the meeting and said she is interested in learning some new tricks from the other women.I know enough about programming to be dangerous,she said. But I'm a little rusty, so I'm here to learn.She said she thought working on a website that is for a real nonprofit is a good way for the group to learn.

I like that we're doing something that's vocational and not something that's never going to be used,Landquist said.And Noel said she hopes the site will not only offer a real-world programming scenario, but that it would be a good way to teach the women how to make a website without any pre-existing program or template.I want people to actually learn the right way to make a website,Noel said.If you start a website from scratch, you can build any website you want and have it work.Slemberger said they modeled their meetings after the meetings of the Missoula Women's Business Network in an attempt to make them both social and educational.The group will meet the first Thursday of every month, and if any women miss the meetings, the programming process will be voice-recorded and posted to their website.Before the meeting Thursday night, Slemberger said she wasn't sure how popular the group will be in the community.

We had a few regular attendees in 2008, and I'm hoping they'll show up, but it could just be me and June and the crickets, she said.Nearly all of the women who attended the meeting last night had at one point worked for Spectral Fusion Designs in the University Center, which Corporate Web Design and maintains websites for the university community.Becka Stone is a senior in information systems management and heard about the group through her job at Spectral Fusion. She told the group that she wanted to learn more about the design and organization of websites.Everything's just going web now, and having a basic understanding of it is so important, she said. You need to have a web presence in order to have any professional weight in the world.