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.

So I made some slight changes to the RSS feeds and added a new one. The result unfortunately was that all the old items may show up as new ones in your reader (as they did in mine). So, no there were not 500+ news submissions today. Some of you may be interested in the new “Popular” feed. Let me know if you run into any difficulties with it.

I have put in a few improvements to the site.

1. Google search for the gallery.
2. New “popular” section on the home page located right under the “New” feed.
3. New redesigned listing page.

I dropped the very unused “links” feature. I’ll soon be adding new ones to fill the void left in its absence.

We’ll I was just notified by my hosting company that they had to migrate my site to a new server. It has caused me a few headaches. I have noticed a few things that are a little broken and some submission and votes may have been misplaced in the transition. Over the next couple of days I’ll be working to get everything back into place … and if everything goes well I may sneak in a few new features.

You can now view the sites with the most votes in the last 7 days, 30 days, or all time. Visit the “Votes” tab in the “Gallery” an look under the main heading on the page for a the new menu.

I have had several suggestions about an improved voting system. Today over lunch I made several changes to the way it works. Instead of a simply adding your vote to sites that you like you can not vote “against” site you don’t like.  On each page you will see a “My Style”  link and a “Not My Style” link. Click on the one that best describes your feelings about the site you are looking at.

The feature is live and working … hopefully. I have not rolled it out to user profile pages or to the “New Votes” area of the home page, but watch for that all to be updated over the next day.

If you encounter an issue, please let me know.

I have added snap previews to the “view this site” link on the site details page. You can view the preview by hovering your mouse over the little greyish speech bubble thing beside the site’s url. If it drives you crazy you can turn the previews off by going into the snap options or leave me a note here.

Go check it out. 

I am trying to make your life easier so I created a “Submit to edStyle” bookmarklet. I have been using it and it seems to work just fine. You will still need to fill in the “School Name”  and be sure to double check the “Site Name” field … you didn’t expect me to do all the work for you, did you? Anyway, Go give it a spin.