CoPress

On the schedule this past week for the Summer Web Design Camp was ideas for radically redesigning homepages. Joey Baker led Jake Paul, Lauren Rabaino, Emily Babay, Ethan Klapper, Ben Leis, and myself participated in a discussion of some varying approaches to homepage design. You can watch a recording of the session over on Blip.

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Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets – Daniel: New version of WordPress! Includes improvements to themes, adds multiple widgets, and offers more flexibility with taxonomies.
• Rise of the Data Scientist – Joey: The responsibilites of a data-journo.
• Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture – Joey: Journalism shouldn’t strive for perfection before publication, but perfection through publication.
• The Future of Local Newspapers: Product vs Platform – Daniel: A new voice in the discussion with a few interesting ideas, such as having the community could buy into the ability of determining editorial voice and what gets covered.

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Daniel offered suggestions for redesigning a homepage in preparation for this week’s Design Camp session. Joey added his opinion,

• There’s tons of student groups that want attention and market that on facebook through events and groups – why can’t you take that info and post it on your site? Facebook is constantly updating and it’s just what you’re friends are doing. If 5% of the info from the whole school is good for general consumption, you’ve got a lot of info to present.
• A hefty chunk of groups want alumni support (monetary) give them an ad package that includes updating you with any event they do. You don’t have to write an article, but that data can be presented well.
• There are always events happening on campus. Everyday nearly. You just need to know about them. At a minimum, I bet you can add one new, “event on campus” to your homepage everyday.
• Do what you do best, link to the rest: pull in content from your local newspapers, publish2, ESPN for sports news, relevant articles about college in general (use Publish2!)

On the wiki, Lauren added updates to the Summer 2009 Projects page.

Last Thursday was the second session of the Summer Web Design Camp and after some technical difficulties Jake Paul, Will Davis,Lauren, Daniel, Mo Jangda, and myself discussed navigation menus and what could be done to drastically change them.

The session started off with a quick demo of creating drop-down menus in WordPress and the files involved are all available for download. From there we started discussing the different ways in which sites handle navigation and what we all liked and disliked about the various approaches. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to record all of this discussion because of some technical problems with my laptop, but I’ve included what I have at the bottom of this post as well as the text from the Skype chat.

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