Those of you who drop by my office from time-to-time may have discovered two things about my morning routine. 1) I have to have my cup of coffee, and 2) I love to make coffee rings!

To help manage my busy life I use a self-created time management sheet. I have this on my desk at all times and I use it to keep my work life on track. Recently I have decided to intentionally make coffee rings on this sheet each morning – not sure why…

One thing I have discovered in this process is that there is design in anything and everything – even in my coffee rings. Now if my coffee rings were the exact same each day this exercise would have stopped on day three. The rings are all different – they have different designs. The example I posted here (created on October 30, 2008) is a great example of the depth of colour you can achieve. This is determined by how much coffee is on the bottom of your cup, how much the paper absorbs, if there is another piece of paper below it that also absorbs, any drips that may occur… the list goes on.

Web design is also more complex than people may think. The word “design” brings to mind thoughts of how a website may look – possibly what pictures they may want to have posted. Really web design is about so much more.

There is the design of the information architecture, design for usability, design of navigation and don’t forget the content (copy) layout! Should we consider good code design – xhtml, css, PHP, javascript – all working together. Database design… is your database optimized? How about search engine optimization design – do you want the website to be found?

Okay – I could go on here forever – my point is this: a Website design (or redesign) project encompasses so much more than the basic look & feel of the web site. At first glance my coffee ring may look like a simple spill or a mess – trust me  – it is so much more.

Next time you are down near my office drop in and I will show you the coffee ring of the day and we can chat about the beauty of design.

Facebook is quickly becoming the social networking site of choice by many Internet users. It has been around for quite some time but has been gaining momentum in the last year. Many who were spending countless hours on MySpace or other similar social networks seem to be migrating over to the Facebook phenomenon – or at least using multiple sites.

One of the reasons is Facebook’s clean interface and ease-of-use. The navigation is simple and straight forward – it is easy to find out what’s up with your friends. It seems to be built with the end-user in mind. As a web developer who thinks about these things daily, I find Facebook a real treat.

Sometime between when I went to bed last night and when I woke up again this morning Facebook launched their “new look”! – it is a lot more than just a new look – there are some changes in navigation – your inbox – and how networks are managed. You can get the whole scoop at the Facebook blog here.

Here are the highlights… » Continue reading “A Facelift for Facebook”

In the world of web development there is an endless supply of how-to articles describing what the author thinks is the best way to accomplish some amazing look or function on a web site. Quite often the resort to wacky hacks that break once a new version of Internet Explorer comes out.

This tutorial has to be one of the most amuzing I have read – possible not the most useful but definately amzuing.

Well here is a top ten list that I am happy to not see my name on.

The 10 worst web pages features on WebPagesThatSuck.com in 2006

This is an enjoyable site for we to look through every once in a while – The premise is that you can learn good design by looking at bad – if nothing else it is a good laugh. The author – Vincent Flanders – only picks on organizations that should know better – not on teenagers trying to create the perfect virtual them on their MySpace site – <cringe>

Tyndale is far from the top ten worst web sites – we are not perfect – but not in that bad of shape either. There is one University that made the list – Brown University. I will let you read Vincent’s comments on the subject if you are interested – in summary:

…their home page is both poorly designed and overwhelmingly difficult to use…

Sidenote: #4 on his list is an embarasment to the Christian faith – a web site called – Acept Jesus, Forever Forgiven! – if you see it you will understand…

In October Tyndale’s Web Steering Committee gave me the mandate to rebuild the Tyndale front entry page as well as create more robust front entry pages for the University College and The Seminary. The goal was to have these 3 pages launched before Christmas break.

We started from scratch – with input from the committee, Academic Deans, Communication department and others, we developed a new look and feel for theses pages. I realized quickly we could not just do these pages alone as some of the new content on these pages required other pages for support. There was no point in creating these sub-pages in the old look so content templates were also created.

I am proud to announce on behalf of the Web Steering Committee that this project launched at 7:15 this morning!
Swing by and have a look:

http://www.tyndale.ca

http://www.tyndale.ca/universitycollege
http://www.tyndale.ca/seminary

In addition we have added some new great content to support these pages – I will speak on these soon – for now have a look at the new interactive map/location page:

http://www.tyndale.ca/about/map.php

I have also had time to port the Foundation and About sections into the new look and feel. I am not sure at what point we will be able to port the rest of the site to this new look – the Web Steering Committee will have to look at this in the near future.

If you would like to leave comments please do below!

Lately there has been a great surge in Tyndale faculty requesting a web site. This is awesome! We have developed a easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS) for them to use. This makes creating the data for their web pages really easy. Here are some examples of faculty sites.

The other day I also had a faculty (Richard Davis) come by my office for some advice on a newsletter. He was in the process of creating a newsletter for his department – the purpose of this newsletter was promotion. Not promotion of himself but of Tyndale and the Philosophy program that he is part of. He was convinced that putting out this newsletter would draw the attention of more prospective students.

I like Richard’s thinking – I know that he is not the only one thinking this way either – especially on the University College side of the faculty. Newsletters, blogs, web sites, wiki’s and so on are all great tools to deliver information within the educational context – but these are also great promotional tools!

Are you a faculty member? Do you have some great ideas of ways to use technology either in the classroom or for promotional purposes? Do you need our help to do it? We have this down to an art now and would love to help! Give us a call…

Last night I spent the evening with my kids walking the streets in the dark – some call this trick-or-treating! I was amazed by some of the great designs carved into the pumpkins left in front of the door steps. I am both a developer and a designer and tend to look at the things around me from a design perspective. When I look at the sky I often wonder how I could replicate that gradient in a graphics application – some things are better left to God I guess.

Now my family pumpkin was no designer piece – it was a nice clean design – very typical as you can see – but nothing special (from a design perspective that is). My daughter Rachael and I had a great time carving it and even signed the back once we were done – it is a piece of art!

Many of the ones we saw as we walked from house to house were quite amazing – design is everywhere