Sometimes I wish I was less serious. Learning needs to be fun… I’m constantly reminded of this by my two-year-old daugher (shown here in all her seriousness – taking after dad). At least, if it’s not fun, it needs to be memorable (surprising, shocking, beautiful, counter-intuitive.)
Reminded me in turn that it’s time to update this prototype design for liveandletlearn.net with something that’s more fun. I’m thinking of something much brighter with a light/white background, less cluttered (more whitespace) and much simpler. On the technical side for those who are into that, I’m gonna trial the K2 modification for wordpress (it adds some funky AJAX functionality and extensibility out of the box). It’s currently beta, but looks like it’s got some really cool and, more importantly, usable stuff! Might also update to WordPress 2.0 Beta. I also want to update my RSS feed to embed a funky picture in the feed (like Ian’s).
If anyone’s got some thoughts about the current prototype (what they hate/like), or ideas for designing fun stuff, I’d love to hear it!
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Hi Mike,
I reckon the title would be better without the sparky globe. But I like the graffiti font. More ‘white’ space is exactly what LLL needs. I really like the traditional wordpress layout of one central column and heaps of quite space either side. I also like big random pictures that load in some user’s implimentations. Could you configure it to load randomly one pic from a bunch of Flickr pics?
Merry Christams, happy new year, and thanks for the card :)
Thanks Leigh for the feedback! Will get rid of the sparky globe (I was trying to have some meaningful logo, but failed :-) )
Yep, it’s possible to have the big random picture in the header (like DarcyNorman.net)… not sure if I want to do this or something really clean (like ClearLeft). I might just put my design doc up on here with the competivie analysis so I can show the kinda look I was thinking about… (helpful for students too)
Glad you got the card… Mim still runs around shouting “Tea Party!!” with the tea set :)
I actually like the globe :)
If you go to http://www.feedburner.com you can get a fancy rss feed with stats etc. Might not want to rely on someone else though… your call.
Also, I think that wordpress 2.0 just got released, it includes all ajaxy fun right out of the box.
-Ian
Yeah, I thought about feedburner… but want to make sure that i don’t need to ask people to resubscribe… I guess I can just keep the old feed working too? (I’ve only got a few subscribers, so I don’t want to lose them :)).
Just updated to wordpress 2.0 today… yet to check out the new options…
OK just found the following discussion on the Feedburner forums:
Pointing an existing feed URL at your new FeedBurner URL
I’m really loving the Squible theme for Wordpress too… I’m just playing with it locally at the moment… lots of great features, and all very usable!
yay! looking great Mike. Talk about bells and wistles!