Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash in this month’s Website Magazine suggests that elements such as wild background colors, garish text, visual embellishments (eye candy) and animation/video distract website visitors from important content.  In a case study of a redesign of the CREDO website they found an 84% improvement with a simplified design.  The case study used a new service called AttentionWizard.com which uses computer algorithms to approximate eye tracking studies of a web site.  The idea is these will reveal what point on the page the visitor’s eye should land on.  If it is what you want them to see — like a buy now button — bingo, you are doing well.  If their eyes don’t land anywhere, or on the wrong things it is time to make some adjustments.  I thought it would be fun to compare the Yale and Harvard main websites using the service.

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Client asks “can I list multiple authors on an article in our CMS?” After a quick search and a little playing around I could give my standard WordPress answer “it turns out there is a plug-in for that!”  The Co-Authors Plus plug-in nicely met our needs.  We list both the author’s display name and the Biographical Description in the author tag line with the meta information at the head of the post.  And based on the suggestions in the plug-in’s readme.txt file I created the following function to generate the display:

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The program is finished and posted for the WordPress University workshop, scheduled for Thursday April 8, 2010.  It is a really exciting program: Read the rest of this entry »

From the Chronicle of Higher Education to Popular Science writers are exploring the future and place for OpenCourseWare.  The Chronicle reviews the ongoing costs, and that with budget cuts continued funding for open courses is tough.  Popular Science is writing from the perspective of an interested adult learner, wondering how interesting the courses are.  The conclusions from both perspectives indicate that the opencourseware movement is still trying to find its way.  And I think that until opencourseware initiatives are integrated into the core activities of universities and colleges, their future and purpose will remain uncertain.

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Fooling around with AJAX has been on my web programming to-do list for quite some time — like years.  I’ve read bits and pieces on it, but I never had the right project come along at the right time.  Finally the planets aligned. With a series of 15 google calendars, and my task is to make one web page that will allow users to easily navigate between them.  You can see the first working prototype here.  I created a table in MySQL that holds the information on each of the calendars, and a PHP script that delivers the proper Google embed code based which calendar is selected.

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Compare the presentation on an MIT opencourseware lecture on the MIT page and Academic Earth.  Open Earth provides much of what users expect in a site — tools to share the page on Facebook, embed it in a web page, or add it to favorites.  Also note the lecture can be graded by logged in users.  Along the right side bar we get suggestions of related videos. And along the bottom are the Editor’s picks.  On the MIT page?  There is none of this.  Which site are you more likely to use?  Which invites further exploration and return visits?

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