Make sure you also take a look at the new smart CSS design templates and libraries of new styles. I'm pleased to say I had a tiny hand in creating three of the color variations used for the new Vicksburg theme, although the true credit for the design and CSS magic goes to Vicksburg's creator, Walt. View the new templates and others at the Style Library Remixer.

For the last month, I've had the rare opportunity to sit in the MT area at Six Apart next to some of the people that have built Movable Type, including Jay, Anil, Ezra, Brad. Aside from the fanfare over the actual product, it's the dedication and teamwork of the people behind the product that have really impressed me.

(News story at our company site from Aug 5, 2005: Ideacodes to Create Wireframes and Visual Designs for Six Apart).

If any of you have upgraded to 3.2 and have feedback, please feel free to comment.

Take the survey

What Can You Learn from a Cell Phone? Almost Anything! by Marc Prensky

I like how the author summed it all up by saying “Despite what some may consider cell phones' limitations, our students are already inventing ways to use their phones to learn what they want to know. If educators are smart, we will figure out how to deliver our product in a way that fits into our students' digital lives—and their cell phones.” It is so true.

Instructional Blogging:Promoting Interactivity, Student-Centered Learning, and Peer Input by Stuart Glogoff

The author sites examples of how blogging has worked as an “exceptional learning tool”. The students are able to respond and give feedback to assignments, journal entries and reflections of both teachers and fellow students alike. Blogging can be used as a learner-centered tool through the use of feedback and comments.

Read her post...

I once worked with a colleague in the web industry who talked about design as purely visual. "We don't need to start thinking about the design yet," he would say, "It comes later in the process," he would insist.

But the reality is that the design is the process; it is the thinking.

As someone formally trained in fine arts (and had my first Macintosh when I was eight), I've often walked the line between art and design, emotional and functional. If art is something to be exhibited and understood, design is something to be used and intuited.

One of the most insightful comments about web design came from a thirteen year old student. When asked what would improve the design of the site, she answered, "it's not about what the site looks like, it's about how it feels when I use it and whether I can find what I want and have fun doing it." Her intuition told her the same thing that designers in every field have been striving to achieve since the beginning: a seamless and positive experience.

But never has a strategic design approach been more powerful and evident than in today's environment of high consumer expectations and an onslaught of choices.

A recent article at Fast Company points to the need for business leaders (and anyone else concerned with providing effective solutions and high customer satisfaction) to take note of a better way of operating - where strategic/holistic design takes center stage. In The Business of Design, Bill Breen writes, "In an economy where style is king, we all need to start thinking and acting more like design."

Strategic design thinking at the start of your college or university web redesign project can be the difference between a poorly executed, high-cost quagmire that only serves the needs of a few, or an innovative, cost-cutting solution that effectively serves the goals of many.

Perhaps in 1996, web design may have been accepted as creating layouts and page comps. Today, strategic web design is about user research, market analysis, click patterns, visitor experience, content delivery, technology standards, concept media, mobility, personalization, rapid prototyping, and so much more. When I talk with my clients today, we definitely talk about color hue, but we probably also discuss web standards, podcast integration, how to utilize Ajax applications, and where to feature moblogs.

http://www.middlebury.edu

Both ExpressionEngine and Movable Type offer a low-cost one-time license fee ($149 - $1300) with full-featured options for managing multiple school-wide blogs for a variety of purposes. In fact, at Stanford University, Movable Type facilitates communication throughout the IT department, and around the entire university for campus-wide blogging. The benefits to these web-based publishing systems are numerous, but among them are built-in blog functions (commenting, trackback, pinging, RSS, search, archiving, categories, bookmarklets, moblogging, post by email, member management) and the efficiency of light-weight and web-based software. Plus, the fact that you have access to all the source code (written in common scripting languages like PHP, ASP, CGI) doesn't hurt either. If you're still not convinced, why not try out the free, award-winning Wordpress publishing system?

While blogging has been accepted and advanced in industry by major technology movers several years ago, (Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time in 2002), traditional media (NY Times Cannes Film Fesitval blog) and numerous other industries, higher education has been slow to adopt the paradigm of publishing daily, timely personal voices for marketing reasons. Bloated price quotes from consultants don't help the situation.

Consider the usual audience. Blogs used in higher education for undergraduate or graduate recruitment are targeting a web-savvy market of high schoolers and undergraduates. From thirteen-year olds to thirty-somethings, blogs are as normal as IM. The popular blog community Livejournal has more than 7 million users with over 10,000 posts per hour. Another social blog space, MySpace, has over 12 million users. Blogs used for recruitment need to allow freedom for students to tell their own stories beyond the usual "I love this school" or "orientation was fun" rhetoric. I'm certainly not advocating unmediated blogging on a public site, but there needs to be freedom to the writer's voice. Schools that don't take the conceptual leap are simply creating diary-versions of testimonials and not really exploring the full potential of blogs.

From an academic perspective, blogs are being explored in e-learning settings as well as in real classrooms. While some in higher education are still learning about blogs, the offspring of the self-publishing blog movement and the iPod revolution has has already been born in the podcast. At Marymount Manhattan College, Professor David Gilbert has launched a class project called Art Mobs in which his Organizational Communication students to produce (unofficial) audio guides for MoMA, and make them available as podcasts. The site is a hosted Typepad blog site. Cost? $14.95 a month.

For a current project of ours, a K-12 client has decided to go with a publishing system not only to run active news, events, and document management for students, parents and faculty, but also to function as a full content management system (CMS) for the new website. Again, the licensing cost here is in the thousands, rather than tens of thousands.

Maybe if we demystify the price of implementing the "latest" technology, we'll give our communications teams, administrators, marketing directors, IT department, admissions directors, and faculty the chance to strategically think through the implications and to explore what's already possible.

Backpack captures the fluidity and functionality that I sought and only dreamed of in 1996. Along with an intuitive user experience, the feature set is impressive. Set reminders to email you or your mobile phone, create pages with content, lists, notes, upload images and files, create link pages, and select page-level sharing (with friends, colleagues, communities) for privacy or access. Handling your life and brain online has never been easier.

Backpack could be used if you're a faculty, student, researcher, adminstrator, alumni officer, athletics coach, and the list goes on. Whatever your role in the organization, you or your team can benefit from a flexible planning and collaboration space online, accessible 24/7 at home, office, hotel or airport.

More information:
Backpack, the organizer.
Basecamp, the project management system.

Also:
As I wrote about in this post about Flickr, Backpack and Basecamp are also great examples of the next wave of web applications, currently coined as Ajax by Jesse James Garrett on February 15, 2005. We'll be writing more extensively about Ajax in another post.

Once you fill out the simple web form you will be pushed to the next page with a long piece of html code that will encode your email address from all spam bots. All you have to do is copy and paste this code into the same place your old email link was. That's it, you're done!

Don't forget to try out some of the other free tools at the site. Automatic is a full service software development company. They build web applications, electronic publishing tools, content management systems, and database driven websites with a focus on usability and standards-based design.

Time after time in audience surveys, focus groups, and marketing surveys, one of the top requests from visitors to school websites is the desire to see "real life" at the school. Whether the visitor is a potential student, current parent, a parent of a prospective student, alumni and alumnae, faculty colleagues, potential new faculty, or a member of the school's local, national or international audience, people want to see images of other people — a natural human instinct. At Ideacodes, we've been proponents of immersive media (embedded video) for an even more realistic view into life and learning at schools, but frequent, updated photos are a great start and often more immediate, accessible and casual.

Why use Flickr?

It's fun! If Google is the epitome of the functional, fast, and most effective search, I would have to say Flickr is its photo-managing-and-sharing equivalent. The suite of tools is seamless and the user experience is highly intuitive. As you start to explore what Flickr has to offer you're constantly surprised by its integration and offerings -- post photos through email to your Flickr site, easily flag content as private, public and to what degree (friends, family, everyone), organize your photos using a dynamic flash app, invite your friends, join any number of Flickr groups, tag your content, explore others tags and photos and see who else is thinking like you are. That's just the mere tip of the iceberg, too.

Flickr is also a glimpse into the next wave of what's possible with web applications. Brewing under the surface of Flickr is an underlying technology that is just beginning to buzz in web design, developer, social software, and even investment circles. This is a whole other story that we'll be posting about shortly. Suffice it to say that among others, Yahoo, Ester Dyson, and Joi Ito have all invested in Flickr.

What Can My School do with Flickr?

Here are some ideas if you're a school, college, or university:

• Put up a new photo tour of the school (and allow others to add their own photos of campus)
• Showcase photos from Admissions events
• Make a school moblog and have students moblog their cell phone photos
• Create a student portrait gallery with quotes or better yet, personal anecdotes about life at school
• Create albums of Alumni class reunions
• Post ongoing photos of the new Science building construction for donors and alumni to see
• Make a Commencement album to show ceremony photos (and to encourage graduates or parents to submit their own photos)
• Add a photo section to your student publication and use Flickr for the gallery

Be sure to read the article carefully as the entire top of the hack needs to be there to filter for Safari and not affect other browsers. This progressive filtering system must also be sequenced exactly as laid out in the article.

The only issue I found was that the @media all and (min-width: 0px) line caused a problem with CSS validation. I took the entire Opera hack out and it still worked fine for Safari without affecting other browsers.

The Code (please visit the above listed link before using):

The Web Standards Project
Devoted to adhering to W3C standards in Web page design.

Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
"Designing With Web Standards is for every web professional who wants to reach more users on more browsers, platforms, and devices – including wireless and hand-held devices – with less work, less maintenance, and at lower cost. It’s for designers, developers, site owners and managers who seek to end the costly spiral of obsolescence, where each new browser or Internet device means a whole new coding cycle and another line item on the budget. Few organizations today can afford the merry-go-round of coding and re-coding that has characterized web development until now."

The Business Value of Web Standards by Jeff Veen

Web Standards Awards
The Web Standards Awards aims to promote web site design using W3C standards by seeking out and highlighting the finest standards-compliant sites on the Internet.

A web standards checklist by Max Design Australia

Developing With Web Standards by Roger Johansson

Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm
"I wrote a book. It's filled with standards-compliant solutions intended to give web designers and developers ammunition — to make the best choices with markup and style."

Using Headings
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-logical-headings

Search Engine Friendly URLs
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls
"Most search engines (with a few exceptions - namely Google) will not index any pages that have a question mark or other character (like an ampersand or equals sign) in the URL... what good is a site if no one can find it?"

Tools

Code Validator
http://validator.w3.org/

CSS Validator
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/g/

Text-based Browser Simulator
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview/

Broken Link Checker
http://validator.w3.org/checklink/

What Is Web Accessibility?: A List Apart
Understanding web accessibility and the needs of disabled users.
www.alistapart.com/articles/wiwa/

Section 508: The Road to Accessibility
Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.
www.section508.gov

Designing More Usable Web Sites
Guidelines, projects, browsers with accessibility features and other information related to the accessible design of web sites.
trace.wisc.edu/world/web/

The Guild of Accessible Web Designers
An association of organisations and accessible web designers and developers promoting accessible web design standards.
www.gawds.org

TOOLS

Validate your site at Cynthia Says
Cynthia is a web content accessibility validation solution.
www.contentquality.com

Lynx Viewer
View your site on a text browser simulator
www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html