Style

What colour do you want them there shingles to be?

That's the dilemma that is facing me now - an issue of style. What do I want my professional homepage to look like?

I'll be honest, I like the top and background of one of my blogs - Virtual High School Meanderings. I like how the lighthouse on the side kind of blends into the background (particularly in the bottom righthand corner of the image). I like the fact that it is white or a very light colour, with a crisp and clean design.

It would be nice if there was a beam of light coming from the lighthouse, where I could add my name. I've been playing in Fireworks for the past hour, trying out things and this is the cloest I could get:

It's not bad for an amateur, which is really what I am when it comes to graphical design and image manipulation, but it doesn't have the same kind of professional look at the one on my blog does.

In terms of content, I like the way that my colleague Drew Polly has designed his site - focusing upon the things that are important in academia. I think if I had categories across the top, and I do like that top layout, I'd use:

Home / CV / Biography/ Teaching / Research / Service

Then on each page I'd have two bars, the one you see above and a page specific bar. For example, the one under Biography would read:

Professional / Personal / Blogs

The one under Teaching would read:

K-12 / Instructional Technology / Social Studies Education

The one under Research would read:

Research Projects / Development Projects / Evaluation Projects / Publications / Presentations / Funding

The one under service would read:

Departmental / College-University / Professional / Community

I think it would make a nice layout, at least in terms of content. I need to send some more like with a fellow student, Peter Rich, to figure out how to do some of the Firworks stuff (and to get some better designs for overall layout). This is the difficult part of the task. Once I have something I like, copying and pasting from the current content and updating what has become out of date is easy enough.

Tags: AECT 2006, AECT, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education