There has been discussion here in the past about whether or not High Schools website should be included in eduStyle. The majority of the opinions were heard were that High Schools needed a place of their own. I was pretty excited yesterday to get an email from Zac Gordon who has put together just that place, Web Gallery High. Zac teaches web design and development at Springbrook High School and Montgomery College, both in Maryland. He described to me some of the reasons for developing the site:

The idea for a high school site came pretty much at the same time I first saw eduStyle a few years ago.  There are not many high schools out there that have standards compliant sites, and the students and teachers who take their time to develop them deserve some recognition.  This goes along with my work to improve webucation at the high school and college level.

Congrats on the Launch of Web Gallery High and all of your other efforts spread awareness of standards based web design. You can see other stuff that Zac is doing on his education website and at his web design company’s site.

If you are interested in Zac’s efforts to improve “webucation” you may also be interested in the two articles from the latest edition of A List Apart:

• Elevate Web Design at a University Level by Leslie Jensen-Inman
• Brighter Horizons for Web Education by Aaron Walter

A few days ago we celebrated our 2nd anniversary here at eduStyle. The last two years have been an amazing ride. The idea for eduStyle started on the side of my bookshelf in my cubicle at Athabasca University. Me and my co-workers would print out higher-ed site we liked and tape them to the bookshelf try to inspire each other by looking at what others were doing right. Finally in late January of 2007 I announced the launch of the site on the uwebd mailing list to an amazing response.

Two years later things have grown a lot. Last year we launched the eduStyle awards and the community rose up submitting thousands of nominations and people’s choice votes. I left my day job and had to bring in my brothers, Cody and Andy, to help with the work of getting them off the ground. The community took ownership and they were an amazing success.

As the site has grown the time needed to run it has grown as well. We now have over 2000 registered users. We get approximately 15 new submissions to the gallery every day. We have tracked over 160 redesigns (with lots yet to post). We have hundreds subscribed to our monthly newsletter. The site gets over 10,000 visits each month (2x last year this time’s traffic).

In running the site we have tried to be sensitive to the community and not allow the site to become overly commercial. We make a little money from advertising (thank you DotCMS, Campus Tours, OmniUpdate, and OnlineCollege.org) but it doesn’t come close to covering the time requirement and the costs associated with running the site and doing the eduStyle awards.

We do all of this because we love the community and really want to help inspire campus web designers. So, we hope you don’t mind, but with this birthday celebration we ask that you consider giving eduStyle a little bit of a birthday present this year. Here are some ways you can show your support for what we are doing and help us continue to commit the time we’d like to to eduStyle.

5 ways to say happy birthday

1. If you are able consider either a one time donation or a continuing sponsorship of the site. We have $2, $5, and $10 dollar monthly donations or a one time gift in any amount.
2. Let any of our sponsors know how much you appreciate their support of the site.
3. Let your vendors know how much you value eduStyle and encourage them to help support the community by advertising on the site or sponsoring the awards.
4. Buy the eduStyle book when it comes out.
5. Wish us a happy birthday in the comments here, on your blog or in your twitter account (@edustyle).

Thank you for all the support you have given over the last two years and for your continued support. We really couldn’t do this all without the support of the community.

For those that haven’t come across EDU Checkup yet, it is the idea of Nick DeNardis who is the Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University. We blogged about it here when he first launched the project. One of his tasks at Wayne State is to review and benchmark other university web sites. In October he started recording his impressions in a regular video podcast. He’s doing great work in spreading awareness of best practices and we’re pleased to be able to share those with the eduStyle community in a regular feature on the eduStyle blog and in our monthly newsletter. Once a week we’ll share the links to the latest EDU Checkup video reviews of sites from the eduStyle gallery. We hope you enjoy. Here is this weeks reviews.

• Harvard University
• University of North Carolina – School of Pharmacy
• Regent University
• Kaplan University
• Texas A&M  – Engineering
• University at Albany
• Gettysburg College

I was working through some research for the book and some year end numbers and thought I’d share some of it. This is a collection of just the navigation systems from the top, as voted by users, redesigned site from 2008. I had to scale some down to fit into the post.

We’re pleased to announce that the eduStyle Awards will be returning to the eduWEB Conference. The conference is in Chicago this year and is shaping up to be great and we’re excited to be a part of it again. The opening Keynote Speaker is Dimitri Glazkov a Software Engineer at  GOOGLE working on Chromium and WebKit and there are tracks on Marketing Communications, Design & Development, and a Guest Track Titled Getting It Done! (Moderated by: Karlyn Morissette, Dartmouth College & Matt Herzberger, Texas A&M University).

We’re on track to open up nominations for the awards on Mar 1st. So now is the time to get your websites submitted to the gallery (Login required). Over the next weeks/months we’ll be launching the awards website, announcing the categories, and announcing the judges so stay tuned for more information. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the blog, signup to our monthly email, or follow us on twitter to stay in touch as things develop.

We need your support to make these awards possible. If you are able, please consider supporting them.

We’re still hard at work on the eduStyle book and we’re pleased to be able show some of the details of what we’ve been working on. Today we’ve released the title, cover, partial list of sites and the pricing information. Head over to the book page to get all the details and sign-up to be notified when it is released.