Design – Page 14 – Chris Koerner

New SLU Dot Edu

It’s been a crazy past few weeks. I meant to write about this sooner, but haven’t found the time.

The site not only looks a thousand times better (Bryce!) but the slick new navigation (Mark and Robert!) and the awesome content (Amy!) make this something I’m really proud to have worked on.

Here’s some of my personal favorite things we’ve added:

Consistent Left-hand Navigation – We now have highlighting of the current page you’re on (the little red arrow) and a nestled view of sub-pages. This looks much cleaner and is also a lot easier to navigate.

On the content creation side our users now have a clear understanding of how their site is organized and how to manage their content.

More space (wider layout)

We increased the width of the site by 25% giving us more space for content. Video can now be embedded at full SD resolution and pictures can now be much larger to boot. Along with a consistent placement of our navigation we no longer have to munge content around the right-hand navigation found in the previous design.

Flexible framework – We can now develop new interactive elements

We’re already starting to add new ‘widgets’ to the content of our page. Things like what you see in the screenshot above. News tickers, embedded video carousels, instant response polls, you name it. All due to the new framework we’re using to display our content.

We’re not done adding additional features; like a new search engine, custom departmental banners and a mobile stylesheet!

Thanks again to everyone involved and for those who let me be a part of it. It feels good to be proud of one’s work.

Sideways Video – A Rant on Aspect Ratio

Television has set the standard of common resolutions and aspect ratios for years, but not everything seems as smooth as it should. For one as we are becoming increasingly more web-centric in our distribution models why are we sticking by these ancient limitations of size and shape. Isn’t there something inherently more flexible with the web? Let’s challenge those norms and create something new with video.

Why do we have 16:9 aspect ratio TV sets but most computer monitors are 16:10? TV and computers both migrated toward widescreen layouts around the same time, but why such a subtle difference?

Another funny think about resolutions and the web is that there is no consistency. Take a look at this chart showing common resolutions of visitors to this site:

Some common Laptop resolutions and old school 4:3? How about netbooks? iPhones and Blackberries add even more diversity.

I was sitting at a gas station the other night with my Flip and shot this, sideways. Why not? What I was trying to capture was better suited for a more portrait-like frame and it felt almost natural to hold the camcoorder like a small digital camera. Not to mention I can display a higher resolution video in the confines of the 450px column width on this site.

I’d like to see more creative uses of video, like this. What do you think? Is this just crazy talk?

A Side of Lent

Part of my job is developing a web strategy for the division of Mission & Ministry at SLU. Recently we completed a project that pivoted around a site for the Lenten activities on campus this year. On short notice we got something up and running using Google Sites and I was able to train a few non-web folk to keep it up-to-date.

They kept the site running for all of Lent with over 5,000 visitors and daily updates. The project was a success and something that I’m proud of.

As it was nearing it’s end I started studying the analytics and noticed a trend. It quickly became apparent that the length of time on the site was exceptionally long due to the type of content being written. The average time on site was over four and a half minutes. Longer than any other site I’ve maintained.

I thought to myself, “Wow, these daily reflections would be about a page and a half if printed.”

And in fact I was correct.

lent-book

Interested in brushing up my InDesign skills* I looked into self-publishing options and found Lulu.

Learning a bit about how to format my document, page numeration, margins and all the other fun elements of layout I created a 91 page soft cover edition of the Lent website. All 45 daily reflections seperated by the approprate weekly reflections. The end of the book even contains a list of all the Lenten pledeges that users submitted to the website.

I printed off 4 of these at about $6 a pop. Having enjoyed the professionalism and dedication during this project I gave them as gifts to the key members involved. I think they all liked them – as much as I did while creating it.

*The last time I used InDesign it was called Pagemaker. 🙂