The start of the 1st Annual EduStyle Awards!!!

The details of the conference have got me really excited! It looks like the best conference yet.

• 340 Attendees from around the world New Zealand, Egypt, Ireland, England, Canada,  and the United States.

• Trump Marina Hotel recommended the Tropiano Airport Shuttle Service; other options on EduWeb Conference Ground Transportation page.

Stewart is already there and will be announcing the winners tomorrow during the luncheon so if your attending please show your support for the biggest online higher-ed design gallery on the internet! 

Update from Stewart: It’s all getting started here. Look forward to meeting many of you at the BlogHighEd Social

To be honest I have a love hate relationship with social sites. There have been some great finds like www.thesixtyone.com, and www.digg.com but I also tend to find some that keep my attention for a couple of weeks and then become so annoying that I never come back. That probably leads you to ask, so what? Well I find that a lot of universities are trying to take advantage of the facebook phenomenon. Quickly changing assignments or schedules could be easily accessed by students if they could follow it with Twitter. Having a process where alumni could follow old professors or news from the university would allow continued contact with potential philanthropists for fundraising projects.

While the social sites increase, how and why these types of features can be used becomes more apparent. I guess the better question is where should these features be used? or how could universities use these types of features? Please let us know where you think they have the greatest potential, or if they shouldn’t be used at all. Remember comments build your user ranking so be active.

Over the last year and a half we attracted some of the cream of the crop when it comes users. We have some of the best bloggers in the HigherEd, people who present at conferences and have a lot to offer when it comes to finding the next thing in the industry. Here are just a few to start with…

•  jameskm03-Writer of .eduGuru a blog about Internet Marketing, Web Development and Social Media in Higher Education. He is a presenter at the upcoming EduWeb Conference  July 21-23 in Atlantic City (we are presenting the Edustyle Awards right before his presentation…plug).
• ericstoller-Self described accessibility guru and blogger. He is everywhere on the internet and part of just about every social website. He is our most acitvely involved user and has voted on 527 of our 1234submitted sites!!! 
• designologist- This user has made everyone who has viewed his profile page to turn their laptop upside down. He has voted on 112 sites. For the mystery alone this one is a keeper…
• jillgee-She is ranked numer three in total users for activity. She specializes in online communications and management of complex technology projects for higher education.  She tends to pick sites/pages that focus on usability and are engaging.
• chasgrundy-He has the one of the highest percentages of picking noteworthy site…15%. He is a project manager in the Notre Dame Web Group with expertise is in usability, process, and implementation.

These are just a few of our great users to follow. I will be posting other edustyle movers and shaker over the next few months. Remember you make this site great so make your voices heard and you could be the next profile we highlight.

When reviewing the noteworthy sites from the last 18 months some trends come up quite quickly. Center and left biased menus are very common because they lead your eye to the heart of the page. Many sites use a fairly large graphic that takes anywhere from a quarter to half of the page above the fold. What can the past noteworthy sites tell us about what could be noteworthy in the future? Well first of all, designers are getting to try some new ideas. A great many of the newest pages are trying a more visual style that has become very popular in commercial websites. As the integration of the web continues in to every aspect of our lives Universities are becoming more willing to break new ground. They want to be unique, just look at the noteworthy sites like Loyola-Marymount and Boston University; they are breaking new ground for Higher Ed websites. Now don’t get me wrong this seems to be just beginning and may take some time to get to your institution, but be patient.

We’re proud to announce our first judge from outside of higher-ed, Jeff Croft.

Jeff Croft is a web designer and developer at Blue Flavor, an experience and design consultancy in Seattle. Beyond his work for Blue Flavor, Jeff is a blogger, speaker, critic, and industry thought leader. Prior to joining Blue Flavor, Jeff was a Senior Designer at World Online, an online journalism outfit responsible for a host of award-winning websites and the place of origin for Django, the Python-based open-source Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.

Jeff has been designing and developing web sites nearly as long as there have been web sites to design and develop. He created his first web page in 1994 and got his first web-related job in 1995. Although Jeff possess many technical skills, his true passion lies in visual design, user interface, communication, and social media.

Jeff has recently co-authored two books, Pro CSS Techniques, published by Apress, and Web Standards Creativity, published by Friends of ED.

We’re very excited to have Jeff give us a hand with judging the eduStyle Awards.

Some of you may have also noticed a bunch of errors on the site over the holiday break. You may have also noticed that it took me a few extra days to get the Noteworthy out this month. I have been fighting with my host’s crummy mySQL set-up. They inexplicably limited the number of connections my default account could make and when it was exceeded it locked me out of accessing the database I use to manage this site as well as the page they provide me to manage my database users. Anyway, long story short I have been planning a migration to Media Temple for several weeks and now have more than enough reason to expedite that move. I will be taking the site offline for a few hours this Saturday morning and should come back in a much happier situation. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: We are on the new host and I’m a much happier person. It has been a nightmare for the last few weeks, but I see blue skies ahead. Let me know if you run into any errors on the site.

The voting is open for next month’s Noteworthy sites. Log in and visit the voting page for more information.

It looks like after many years in Rochester, HighEdWebDev is set to hit the road. Don’t get me wrong, I love Rochester in the fall, but please let there be some proposals from schools in Hawaii

http://www.highedweb.org/wordpress/?p=24

All you eduStylers who have students working for you may want to pass this on one.

College Scholarships.org will be awarding a $5000 dollar scholarship to the winning design for a new website they are launching. It will be for a WordPress site, so if you have any students with the right skills this is for them. The deadline is August 14, 2007.

Complete details are located here:

http://www.collegescholarships.org/our-scholarships/web-design.htm

Well as another bonus from the unexpected server migration thrown on me by my host, I have a few weeks of emails that were never delivered. So if you sent me an email and are wondering why I have not got back to you … maybe I didn’t receive it. So it’d be awesome if you sent it again.