We’ve seen this quite a bit while working on the book. Many schools don’t have a clear goal for their homepage. This often leads to confusion, lack of consistency, ineffectiveness, and sometimes even competing objectives. This is something we’d like to get your spin on:

• What is the goal for your school homepage?
• How do you measure it’s success?
• What are the challenges you face trying to implement it?

This week on EDU Checkup I only reviewed two sites, bad weather and an early morning meeting prevented the other two. But from the two sites we learned two great tips.

The first is to put as much information as possible on the public side of your site, there is no need to hide information from a prospective student. Secondly including promotions, news and events on sub pages is a great way to engage student who come in through a search engine. If you only use these promotions on your homepage it is likely you are missing a chunk of users.

I am trying something new which started on the University of Oxford site, after the 10 second test I am asking you (the watcher) to pause the video and comment on what you remember before I talk about what I remember. Check out the comments, its pretty interesting what sticks in everyone mind.

• Pacific Union College (A)
• University of Oxford (B-)

Stay tuned to the @educheckup twitter account and RSS feed for more site updated in the coming weeks. Also if you have not subscribed to the iTunes feed yet its a great way to get new episodes automatically.

In my time running eduStyle I’ve seen some common mistakes across many sites in the gallery. Lots of these revolve around the space between objects. So I though it might be useful to quickly cover 3 types of spacing that can easily improve your websites. For some of you this may be beginner information, you can probably skip this post. This post is for those that don’t really know much about margin, padding and line height. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but I’ll show you 2 quick examples of each, one done wrong and one done right. I’ll also include a little code sample showing how to apply these to your pages.

1. Margin
2. Padding
3. Line Height

Margin

Margin is the space outside of objects. Images are the typical offenders. You’ll know there is no margin when you see the text in a page smash right into the side of an image.

Example of a page with an image floated to the right with no margins.

Easy fix. If you have an image in a page floated to the left or to the right (what is a float?) you are going to want to add margins to the side opposite to the direction it is floated or aligned. You may also want to add margins to the top and bottom of the object as well. So if you have an image floated right you’ll probably want to add a top, bottom and left margin to get some space from the text wrapping around it. If you are floating the image right, add the margin top, bottom and left. If the image isn’t going to left or right, you’ll want to add top and bottom to make sure the text below and above aren’t squished against it. You can add the CSS code to do this in any one of 3 locations:

1. External style sheet
2. Between style tags in the head of the page
3. Inline in the tag for the image (or other object) you want to ad space to

Both 1 and 2 are done in basically the same way, so I’ll cover them together.

External style sheet or between the style tags in the head of the html document

First add a class to the style sheet or between the style tags in the head of the document:

.floatright {
    float: right;
    margin-left: 10px;
    margin-top: 10px;
    margin-bottom: 10px;
}

Assign that style to the tag of the element you want to add the float and margin to using the class attribute:

<img src="images/myimage.jpg" class="floatright" />

The result will be something like this:

Example of an image floated to the right with margins

Inline in the tag for the image (or other object) you want to ad space to

You’ll add all of the CSS code inside of the style attribute of the object.

<img src="images/myimage.jpg" style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;" />

The result will be the same as above.

If you have any questions or anything to add, please leave a comment. Next up will be part 2 on padding.

Thank you for all that participated in last week’s Open Thread. It was a great success. Sounds like most of you use commercial CMSes and like the flexibility of it, but sometimes get frustrated with the workflow.

This week we’re gonna switch gears to a topic more dear to you designers. Design Trends!

Looking back at the last 12 months…

1. What do you see as the biggest trend in higher-ed? Is it good or bad and why?
2. Any trends you are happy to see going?
3. What trends should others follow/ignore?

This week EDU Checkup started out with “B” ratings across the board, luckily Alaska Pacific University broke that trend. Don’t let the “B” score  fool you, all the sites had their individual strengths and weaknesses. Some were great in design but lacked information, others had great information but lacked visual appeal. Can you guess which ones?

Two changes were made to the EDU Checkup Web site this week. First the improved episode archive page which now includes links to all the past episodes on one page with an overview of their score. It is just a first step, I’m planning on making the page searchable and sortable. With over 50 episodes already the page needs to be usable (thanks to everyone for your suggestions). The second change is the addition of the “Most Popular” list on the right column, this will be updated once a week with the most popular episodes of all time.

Here is a list of the sites reviewed this week

• University of Michigan (B)
• Eastern Mennonite University (B)
• Northern Virginia Community College (B)
• Alaska Pacific University (C-)

Stay tuned to the @educheckup twitter account and RSS feed for more site updated in the coming weeks. Also if you have not subscribed to the iTunes feed yet its a great way to get new episodes automatically.

One of the best things here at eduStyle is the community comments and discussions that happens among our users. To further that, we’d like to introduce the Open Thread. The way it will work is we’ll post a few questions about a particular topic related to higher-ed and encourage you to respond in the comments.

So without further ado, our first topic: Content Management Systems

1. Does your school use a CMS?
2. What do you love about your particular CMS?
3. What drives you nuts about your CMS?

As many of you know, we’ve been working hard on “The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher Ed Homepage Design“. We’ll be launching it either late February or early March. We know you’re probably getting sick hearing about it, so we’re gonna give you a little reward for your pain. 

If you’re one of the first 100 people to buy the book we’ll enter your name into a draw for a new iPod Touch. If you buy a team edition we’ll give you three entries. (If you’ve got money to burn, buy 100 copies and lock it away.)

So what’s the best way to know when it’s released? The are two. First, get on the email notification list here. By adding yourself to the list, you also qualify for a nice discount. The second way is to follow any (or all) of the following Twitter users: edustyle, circa1978, or codyfoss. We’ll be talking about it non-stop once it’s out.

We believe this is a great community and we’d like to give back to those of you who work so hard to promote us. We’re planning to set up an affiliate program so you can make a little cash while spreading your goodwill. If you’re a blogger and would be willing to review the book, we’ll also provide coupon codes for your readers. Contact us here if you’re interested in either.

This week on EDU Checkup there was two positive and two not so hot reviews. Overall the points brought up gave some great insight into their design, information and code. I would like to give props to the Dallas Theological Seminary Web site for having the most innovative design this week, great job guys!

If you have not heard of Tales from Redesignland you should check it out. Tony Dunn produces a cartoon strip targeted at higher education web workers and their adventures at work. This week he published a cartoon named “Too Late…“, it shows a web team discovering their site was being reviewed by EDU Checkup. It gets interesting, how would you react if your web site was being reviewed?

• California State University – Monterey Bay (D)
• Dallas Theological Seminary (A-)
• University of Virginia – Department of Environmental Sciences (A-)
• Western New Mexico University (F)

Web designers and developers are an arrogant bunch. We’re personally invested. We pour ourselves into the work. We call it an “art.” And we tend to flip out when clients want to ruin it:

Could you have a little animated wooden horse slide onto the screen, and then a bunch of little people drop out and attack the logo?

I swear, a client actually asked for this. Some part of my “I have to manage this budget and schedule” brain died that day.

Not all requests are quite so bad. But most of them indicate a far deeper problem: clients focus on the wrong things. Whether your clients are faculty members, administrators, your boss, or even yourself—as soon as we start talking design, everyone turns into a designer.

Design is sexy. It’s exciting. And people are opinionated, so they voice their opinions (hint: be careful about asking people for their opinions on subjective matters). But as designers and developers and writers and marketers, it’s our job to point out the obvious: a great design won’t make a bad website a success.

So what makes a website successful? That’s the question you should ask on day one. And every day after, you should hold your decisions up against that goal: will this [design | paragraph | technology] help or hurt our chances of meeting that goal?

In higher education, like most industries, we’re not here to win awards. We don’t have to wow the visitor and impress them with flashy designs or interactions. That’s not why we’re asked to make the website. And that’s not why our visitors visit. The website has a real goal that aligns with a real business objective (e.g., make money, recruit students, or get donations). And everything we do for the website should start and end at that goal.

So for big projects, I’ve started asking clients (or our team) to come up with a mission statement. Not for the organization, but for the website itself. A simple, clear statement of why the website exists and how it will be measured. What’s the point? If you can’t answer that question, then all the animated horses in the world won’t do you any good.

With all of the exciting things going on at eduStyle (awards & book) we want to make sure that we can continue to put out valuable content via the blog. Since there is only 24 hours in a day, we figured the only way to make this happens was to recruit a few top notch people to join us as regular contributors to the blog. The first one we’d like to welcome is Chas Grundy. Chas has been wowing us with his contributions to the eduStyle gallery and on his blog grundyhome.com. so we’re excited to have him as a new author on the eduStyle blog. Chas manages interactive marketing for AgencyND – a marketing agency within the University of Notre Dame. As a web marketer, social media advocate, and former developer, he has seen the best and worst of what technology can do for higher education and will be sharing some of his insights and experiences here. Look for his first post in the next few minutes.