Last Sunday night the 81st annual Academy Awards took place awarding Oscars to actors, writers, animators and other movie industry people. Personally — I could care less — I didn’t watch a second of it!

On the drive in this morning Phil and I were talking about awards shows and it got me thinking about industry awards — and more specifically website awards. There are lots of websites that are there only to showcase and/or judge other websites. EduStyle.net is a great example. Webmasters post there site designs for the community to critique and users can vote with a thumbs up or thumbs down. EduCheckup.com does video reviews of university websites — here is a review of the current tyndale.ca. Of course there is also the webpagesthatsuck.com awards — don’t want to win that one!

Now if Tyndale were to win an award — what would I want the award for? I do like our design, we have some pretty good copy. Most of our recent photos have been stunning. Our php and html code is clean and correct — what about awards for these? Well those are all fine and good — but the award I would cherish the most wold be an award for usability.

David Beyer of the Academica Group said it best when he said

“In order to make Tyndale’s web presence a success we must understand and follow website best practices and this key guiding principle — websites must answer the needs of the users first.”

» Continue reading “Website Usability – and the award goes to…”

Danger on Your Desktop are seminars attempting to help parents understand the dangers that internet technologies may pose to their children and teens.

On March 3, 2009 I will be teaching this seminar at Scarborough Christian Academy from 7pm – 8pm. You can get more detail on the event here.

Would you like to know more about the Danger on Your Desktop seminars or download internet safety materials?

I so want one of these! I’m gonna fly!

There is a virus making it’s way through Facebook using the built-in messaging system. The message points you to a video which informs you that you need to upgrade your flash player and prompts you to download a file. This file is NOT a flash update but a virus that, once installed, will try to grab sensitive data off your PC like credit card numbers.

The virus watchdog blog for McAfee labs reports that Facebook is aware of the Koobface attack and is already working to remove the spammed links from its system. But with dozens of Koobface variants known to exist, McAfee warns that “the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.”

via: http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/koobface-virus.html

No— Nehemiah is not a new member of the web development team — in fact — I don’t think he has even heard of the “web”. You see, Nehemiah lived some 400 years before Christ. I guess I am really here to introduce The Nehemiah Project — not Nehemiah himself.

The Nehemiah Project is a project to rebuild the foundation of Tyndale’s main website. Like in the story of Nehemiah (a biblical character from the old testament) — the foundation of Tyndale’s website needs some attention.

Over the last number of years there has been tremendous growth in prospective students using the Internet to aid them in their choice of post-secondary schools. Keeping in step with this trend, Tyndale has been investing great efforts to provide our future students with the information and site features that they both need and want. We have grown.

Tyndale started it’s web presence in 1996 with a few pages explaining who we were and how to contact us if you had questions. Today we have about 14,000 items indexed by Google and somewhere in the range of 6000 – 7000 pages of information — all being managed by 40+ web content managers.

With rapid growth comes increased complexity. Although our current home built content management system (DPA) has served us well over the years — but we have out grown it. It is time to rebuild.

I am introducing this project to you today, but it has been in the works for about a year now. We have gone through an extensive Request for Proposal (RFP) process. We received, reviewed and ranked a number of great responses. Along with the Web Steering Committee, we selected our vendor. We have initiated the research and are reexamining all of our Information Architecture (I/A) — we are well on the way to a successful relaunch of www.tyndale.ca

Watch this blog for more information on the project including updates and opportunities for you to give feedback.

A newly developed website (started October 2008) features Nick DeNardis on video doing live reviews of academic websites. Nick, a Web Developer from Wayne State University, has a keen eye for what students are looking for and reviews these websites from their perspective.

Last week I had submitted Tyndale’s website for review. On Friday Nick did a live review of www.tyndale.ca. Websites are scores in three areas – Visual, Information and Code. We scored an overall 88% (B+) with visual getting an 80%, information getting an 85% and code scoring a 99% – hey nobody is perfect

As we embark on a website redesign project, Nick’s review will be quite helpful. Most of the negative comments he pointed out have already been identified as area to work on but it is nice to have them confirmed.

Watch the video below and then leave me a comment. What would you like to see changed on Tyndale’s website? Do you think Nick was wrong on any points? What did he miss?

In a recent post I talked about design and how we see design in a lot of things including XHTML/PHP/CSS  code. Smashing Magazine published an article today titled “12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean“. The article lays out some very good concepts that should be viewed as best practices for modern web development.

So if code is your thing or you would like to spend a few minutes trying to figure out why web developers have to deal with – swing by and see what you think.