I launched the redesign on Tuesday. I finally gave up trying to get it out at HighEdWebDev because I couldn’t get stable enough network connection to trust upload that many files in one go, so I waited until I was safely plugged in at home. Even then there have been a few minor hiccups since the launch, but overall I’m pretty happy. Here is a quick overview of what has been updated.

Overall

• Redesigned navigation. This should make it easier for me to expand the site and easier for users to tell where they are and what other sections are available.
• Lighter background.
• Secondary color and new fonts for text and links. This should aid readability in the new articles area I’m working on.
• New thumbnails. No more cropped thumbnails, all of the thumbs are full screenshots.
• Nice little icons in the user navigation to make it easier to distinguish different links.

Home page (http://www.edustyle.net/)

• more emphasis on the Noteworthy sites and the other feeds (new, popular, redesigned) have been grouped together underneath

Site pages (http://www.edustyle.net/site.php?site=552)

• New larger thumbnails (404×304) that are no longer cropped. You can now see the full page view without having to click out to the site.
• Redesigned voting area. Many people were mistakenly voting up/down site when they just wanted to see who had voted, as a result I have not made the link with the number of votes go to a page with the people who have voted that way listed. To vote you now must click on the “Add you vote” link.
• You can now remove your vote from a site.
• There are now links to see other site from the same school, other site in the same state, and other sites in the same country. I am still inputting data, so not every school has this information yet but it shouldn’t take much longer to get that stuff up for all of them.
• The tags have been moved to the right of the comments area making them visible by default (before you had to select the “tags” tab).

Other New Things

• New sites page (http://www.edustyle.net/new.php)
• Redesigned page now has a listing of redesign blogs (http://www.edustyle.net/redesigned.php)

I’m still squashing a few bugs and making sure everything validates properly (my firefox plugins have been lying to me I think). I’m also still working on a bunch of new things for the site so you can expect more new stuff over the coming weeks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.