The importance of clean and Elegant Web Design

When designing my online portfolio, I became acutely aware of the importance of clean, and elegant web design.  Thanks to sticking with mostly standards based web design, using CSS, my web page displays elegantly not just on laptops with 14 inch monitors, but also on the difficult to design for Safari Mobile Web browser.  This means my site looks the same on an iphone/ipod touch, as it does in an Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox web browser.   All of the items do not work, particularly the flash based movies, but that's OK.  So long as the site structure itself works, a potential employer can access my resume, and get a general idea of what I am capable of doing, that is good enough for me.  I can truly see the elegance and beauty of complying to standards, be they web based standards, such as CSS, Instructional Design Standards such as ADDIE, or Distance Learning Standards such as Quality Matters.  The standards are there to ensure that the product works reasonably well given a range of normal circumstances.  Thank you CSS!

Here is a great tool for an Instructional Designer on a Budget

http://www.cheapskatefreelancer.com/ This site has a lot of great tools that are free, or are almost free for various technology services. The site features free presentation tools, free image enhancing tools, font tools, and computer management tools. This is a great site for any instructional designer to have in their tool kit during these economic times. Also great for any freelance person in multimedia, ID.

Microsoft Word: A Swiss Army Knife for Professors

Microsoft Word is a Swift Army knife for professors. They use it to compose tests. They use it to grade e-papers, marking them up with track changes. They use it to compose textbooks, and draft email to colleagues.

Thus, it is little wonder that word becomes a tool that faculty are most comfortable with. This comfort level is so great, that when they are challenged with developing pages for a Course Management System, like Blackboard or WebCT, it is the software application that they gravitate to.

Nevermind that word produces dirty code that is not congruent with usability, or good mark up standards. Never you mind that a WebPage created in Word will take the first few sentences of the document which are normally rambling introductory statements, and make them the "title" of the page unless a user explicitly defines a title.

Word is what they know.

And since Word is what they know, it only makes sense to give them some tips to make working with Word, and a popular Course Management System like WebCT, or Blackboard a little "easier", or "better", and make that swiss army knife a little more efficient.

In the next few days, I will post a few tips to make your life developing e-learning content in Microsoft Word less of a hassle.