New Design for TTF

After a lot of thought, strategy, and work, Taking Teaching Further is rolling out a “2.0″ version of the site.  Enjoy.  Here are some of the features:

Theme

The site has a Wordpress 2.7 back end with a great theme called Carrington, created by Alex King.  The theme really helps carry a focus on categories and tags to help make Wordpress into a lite version of a CMS.  Findability and usability take precedence with this theme.  Features are a three-column layout to keep multiple resources in front of readers.  Comments and RSS are easy to use and implement.  One key addition are the addition of feeds for multiple podcasts in iTunes U.  The theme is simple, clean, and helps keep the content the story.

Navigation

Navigation has changed a bit on the redesign.  Kept are the main nav items “Contact”, “Contributors”, and “Why”.  Archives are now in the sidebar as a pull-down.  Added to the main nav is “Feeds”.  Initial roll-out features the title and description of the podcasts we are feeding via iTunes U.  Subscriptions available there.  More substantial are the pearing down of categories into seven main areas of focus for the site.  We took the other categories and had Wordpress turn them into tags for the posts.  Now you can search based on the main categories or filter through to the tags.  Tag cloud available in the sidebar as well.

Sidebar

We decided to choose a three-column layout for the redesign because of the addition of feeds, podcasts, and some expansion of content that is coming soon in the form of video tutorials and reviews.  This will help provide users a high-level update of what content is being generated.

Plug-Ins

• Google Analyatics
  Joost de Valk created a great WP plugin to keep Google analytics connected, regardless of what theme we choose to use.  Gone are the days of pasting the Google code in the header or footer.
• KQF
  John Ha created an amazing plugin to display and pull in any feed to display using the CSS from Carrington and link out to the original content.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t link to iTunes or iTunes U.  Flickr?  Yes.  Any site with RSS content?  Yes.  Beautifully.  iTunes?  Nope.

Podcasts

We’ve created a great start of academic tecnology content for our faculty and desire to share it with everyone.  We started out trying to double-brand the content.  Two versions.  One for everyone.  One for our faculty.  Obviously this became cumbersome.  Thus, we’ve given up.  We’re simply going to feed all of our content straight to you.  We’d also love to get more feeds from your school/organization or your favorites and pull them all in here.

Users/Participation

You can obviously subscribe to the site via RSS, but can also sign up to be a registered user.  We will be putting together opportunities later this spring to connect more intentionally.  you can also email us directly and let us know how we can either be creating content for you, participating with your institution, or having you become a guest contributor.  We’d also love to hear as many comments and feedback as we can get.

Conclusion

With a new theme, mobile version, and updated content and navigation, TTF is poised to gain momentum this spring to really become a resource for educational technology in 2009-2010.  Contact us anytime and let us know how we can help you take your teaching further.