Design Library

Over the weekend, Cole was playing around with some WordPress templates and I have to say what he came up with (top) is far more impressive than the current ETS site design (bottom). The new design looks more professional and I think it's easier to see some of the previously-hidden elements such as the list of whitepapers. I'm interested in hearing other reactions if anyone wants to leave a comment.
ETS New Design

ETS Old Design

A new mini-site about TLT's Collaborative Learning Spaces has gone online yesterday. The site is primarily intended to give students some information about new spaces around campus where they can meet as a group and work on technology-based projects together, practice presentations, conduct research, etc... Mary Ramsey was the content expert. Audrey did the Web design. I was the photographer (nothing fancy). Mary Janzen and Derick Burns were on the team to help craft the message. Overall, I think the resulting site looks pretty good.

The Marketing group has been working on a series of Faculty Stories for the TLT Symposium and other uses within TLT. Mary asked how I was going to put these stories together once I had more than one. I was thinking of creating a page with thumbnails of each of the posters and then linking to each of the stories -- I would have to modify that page when a new story comes along, but that didn't seem like much work. Then it occurred to me that I could tag all of these pages as "faculty stories" and make an alias that went from symposium.tlt.psu.edu/stories to posts with that tag. So I took that route and I think it came out nicely (see below). As a bonus to this approach, I don't have to modify any page when I post a new story and if another site wants to pull these in (to reuse the content), there is a custom RSS feed that links the stories together.

Faculty Stories

The TLT Community Hub site (http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/communities) aggregates a bunch of content from many different sites. At a glance, it's difficult to understand what post is from which site, so we added users for each of the feeds and gave them simple graphics to help distinguish the source site.