Crafting content....

It seems like we should be much farther along in the semester than week 4!?!? Oh well...I think I'm just anxious for spring to get here!

Thinking of spring and new beginnings...The Instructional Tech Toolkit v.1 was officially completed this past week. Laurie is going to upload it to the live site next week and we'll be able to do a soft roll out to faculty, students and staff. I still want to push it to some students for usuability testing, however, I want the final version link to be sent and not what we currently have up there. I will post it soon!

The toolkit project was great to work on, but I'm very happy I still had some work to do on it coming into this semester. I'm taking a web usability course and reading Jakob Nielsen's book helped me to focus on some areas that needed tightening up - namely, content. Nielsen points out that users don't read - they skim. And what they do read is nebulous until they get to what they really want to read - the information they've been searching for - the article or more indepth stuff that's not right up front on a site...basically, what I would call 'drill down' content. Thinking about this on the toolkit site helped me to hone the landing page text and (hopefully) make it easier for users to navigate to the tools they want to explore.

I'm applying the same principles to the redesign of the distance education services pages this spring. It's one of the projects we agreed to look at and since Camtasia is still being sorted out, it will give me a link between practice and classroom theory. I wish cataloging was more about organizing information as it pertains to the web, as having both of these classes together paired with this internship would have been a grand slam!!! Oh well...can't have it all...