Web Design World is coming soon (very soon) – October 18-20 in Las Vegas – and if you’ve never been before (or even if you have and want to attend this year), they have a great deal to pass along to you! I know it’s late in the game for #highered but I thought I would pass this along just in case.
First of all, Web Design World has a great line-up of rock stars in design, UX, content management and more. There will even be a session entitled “Education vs. Other Markets: How Does Design Differ?” with Patrick Haney and Dan Rubin. You can check out the full conference agenda at http://bit.ly/WDWAgenda.
The organizers of Web Design World are extending a special discount for the 3-day Web Design World Passport package – just for higher education web designers and webmasters! To save $400 off the Passport package rate, simply register at http://bit.ly/WDWReg and enter the promo code EDU10.* That’s it!
* Please note: $400 discount is applicable to new registrations only. No refunds will be given on prior registrations.
I just wanted to clarify that I am not attending Web Design World nor is this a paid endorsement. Just a friendly post about a discount that pertains to my favorite group, higher education web rock stars!
So I decided it was time to update the look of my site. I knew I needed more room for content, code snippets just don’t fit in 300 pixels. This update was primarily inspired by my recent decision to move from Palm to Blackberry.
Back to basics, getting rid of the clutter and flare, my site is not here to sell a product but instead teach ideas and present research. One thing the Blackberry does that Palm lacks is the back to basics text driven menus and single application screen and single method of traversing the phone.
The Palm reminds me of Java, over the years it has grown to try to fit everyones needs without realigning or saying no to features which only fit one category of customer. Clunky interfaces and random restarts often happen because of the lack of integration.
In addition to the actual functionality improvements the screen on the BB is a tiny bit smaller but RIM has way better font support and smoothing so making the text quite small increases the amount of text on the screen by 25% over the Palm. I didn’t make my text size any smaller but what I did was increase the space for each entry and went to a fully em controlled layout for more flexibility.
Realigning the content with the right column in my mind was the best decision of the realign, before all my “personal” data was scattered at the top, left and bottom. I decided to concentrate it all on the right column to a clear separation from the article and personal items.
Another thing that bothered me about SimpleLog is that it did not natively validate. The Archives and Search page had some terrible nesting issues. Diving into the core code I changed these to produce a better POSH structured site. Before I was experimenting with the Blueprint CSS framework, well lets just say it was thrown out the window in this version, way too much overhead and not enough benefit.
The design will transform as time goes on as all things but as of right now straightforward is in and I am sticking to it.
Taking something large and packaging it into something short, sweet and understandable is a designers passion. Taking a step back it is also a programmer and teachers passion.
Yesterday I had the honor to give a top down talk and tutorial of a web site manager to my Senior Seminar group. This included all the logic behind a site managers functionality down to the implementation using PHPSimpl
It was really great to be able to explain my passion for the web and visualize it on a whiteboard to people who initially could not grasp even a part of the process, to in the end being so excited about the system they wanted to run to a computer and start coding.
My first attempt to get the group involved was to trace through a web manager and go into detail about how everything connected, this failed miserably. So taking a step back I reverted back to my love for design and took a high level approach and then lead down to the actual code.
A whiteboard is the best teaching tool in my opinion, you can sit at a computer all day and look at code and understand but without seeing the relationships between everything coding can only go so far. Understanding the whole system only breeds better system development, less chance of code clash and fewer bugs.
What it comes down to is the ability to take the huge world of a program, a site, or a collection of sites and package it up to give relevance to the actual user. We do this when creating navigation for a site all the way to creating features for the content management system which houses over 200 sites.
The best programmers, designers and educators can take the massive amounts of data and sum it up, package it and deliver it directly to the brain to influence excitement and energy into the students and process.
My hat goes to all those teachers out there who get to practice this passion to inspire, keep up the good work.
