College Web Design Camp 2009
Our goal is to create an environment within which college news organizations, web developers, and editors can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas about their summer news organization website design projects.
College news organizations have to deal with high rates of staff turnover every four years and by providing a forum in which everyone can exchange code, ideas, and projects hopefully everyone will gain web development skills that can be passed on down to future staff members.
Also, by recording the audio and screen sharing sessions we will be able to create a digital archive of opinions, ideas, and training sessions geared specifically toward college news organizations.
See the associated forum for current discussions.
Contents |
Session Information
Training/Mutual Teaching Sessions:
These sessions would be focused upon the aspect of each others sites that we were critiquing that week. So, for example, when we critique navigation menus one of the participants would lead a training session on creating drop-down menus, styling them with CSS, or something applicable that everyone else would be able to apply immediately to their own work.
Possible training sessions:
- Navigation menus
- Some unfamiliar plugins and how to manipulate them
- Creating category/topical landing pages
- Creating a radical homepage design that focuses on the community's social activity
- Incorporating a wiki into the site
- Incorporating a forum into a site
- All about typography (how do you create a consistent feel?)
- Article pages (where do you put ads? serif or sans-serif?)
- Working with CSS3 techniques and how they can help you
What would these sessions look like?
General Information:
- Bi-weekly (or weekly if there's enough interest) conference calls and screen sharing sessions (acrobat.com provides a solution for screen sharing with a digital whiteboard, chat, and file sharing)
- Spend time beforehand going through others sites and making a list of likes/dislikes/ideas (have certain participants work on others sites every week i.e. everyone isn't responsible for critiquing everyone's site, just one or two every week)
- Start sometime in the late afternoon and last for about an hour
- Start during the last weeks of May or the first weeks of June
- Record the audio and video from sessions and post it on the group blog (also, create a group portfolio site using this Wordpress theme)
The sessions themselves:
- Roughly modeled upon the great Nettuts tutorials
- Give people the skills to implement something right away
- post demos and files for download by the public, not just participants
- Build off of other demos and sessions
- work toward a consistent theme (e.g. making your site more inclusive of community activity)
Schedule
DC09 May 28, 2009
- Leader: Andrew Spittle
- Start with introductions to everyone's websites (what do they look like now and what are your main goals to achieve as we move forward?)
- what skills does everyone have? (this will help to determine who can lead what sessions)
June 4, 2009
- Leader: Andrew Spittle so that others have more than a week to prepare for theirs
- Session: Navigation menus
- How to create drop-down menus in Wordpress
- simplicity is important (limit the number of items to no more than 7, really 5, and preferably 3) (odd numbers are good)
- link to some sites with good and bad examples
June 11, 2009
- Leader: Joey Baker
- Session: Creating a homepage: ideas for a radical departure
- we wouldn't be able to build a homepage in an hour, but this could be a walkthrough and discussion of what can be included
- provide some good examples for the group
- how to incorporate things like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. What kind of value do they add?
- what should you consider to be the aim of your homepage?
- should you build your site from the homepage or build the rest of the site and then build a homepage that fits with the rest of the site?
June 18, 2009
- Leader: Jake Paul
- Session: Article pages
- ideas on where the ads should be placed
- fonts: what type, how big, can or should I use techniques like @fontface?
- photos and illustrations: is there such a thing as too big of artwork?
- different options for sharing articles: what are the plugins and how are they implemented?
- crazy ideas fro improving the reading experience: "Dim the lights"
- better ways of implementing comments
June 25, 2009
- Leaders: Daniel Bachhuber and Will Davis
- Session: Building a wiki into the site
July 9, 2009
- Leader: Jackie Hai
- Session: Designing and coding feature pages
- Full-page multimedia spreads for the web from concept to implementation
- Creating custom CSS styles on the fly
- What kinds of stories deserve 'special feature' treatment?
- Examples from professional and college media
