RodeWorks

Michael Welsch has a thought provoking article on his site — a reprint from Education Canada — Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance. In the article he explores issues relating to the needs of today’s students and the lack of motivation that many express with traditional classroom teaching styles. Text books are not read, students don’t find lecture courses engaging, and only do as much work as required to meet the minimum course requirements. While I agree with many of his points, and fully support innovation in the classroom, I fear much of his focus may be too classroom centric.

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In Web design projects it is the content that really counts, right? In time allocation, I normally figure planning the content inventory, organization and functional needs is easily 60% of the work. Another 20% on front-end goals, and the final 20% on visual design. So why do most clients seem to only want to focus on the visual look? And never seem to get around to the content?

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Rails is the hot web dev topic these days, and digging into a Rails development project has been on my to-do/to-learn list for a while. I’ve got my first podcast from this BuildingWebApps site, and the new Rails 2 book from sitepoint. So no excuses! And what better to while away a beautiful summer afternoon, than learning a new development application!

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Back in the early days of the web, Webmonkey was THE best place to go to learn how to do everything web-design related. The site basically died several years ago, with old content still available, but with no new content going in. But its back, in a hot web 2.0 wiki format. Old favorites are still there — the information architecture tutorial is still one of the best site planning templates I’ve seen — and according to the history tab, recently updated. And new topics are there too, such as a tutorial on microformats. Go get your wallet-sized html cheat sheet and show your geek cred!

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I’ve been involved in some web site re-designs lately, where we’ve spent a lot of time on the navigation and site layout. And I know that those things are important — but I’m not sure they are as important as they once were. Think about your own browsing habits. Most people I see using a browser ‘google’ something, and expect to find what they are looking for in one or two clicks. I rarely see people making extensive use of the site’s navigation.

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