Teach Me the Web

September 29, 2008

I spent a lot of time working on my current site design.  I finished it right before summer began this past season.  I came back to it within about 2 weeks of school starting again frantically polishing it off and transferring it into Expression Engine.  When I came back to it it looked very flat and boring to me so I added the gray doodle that now appears on the right exterior, the pattern in the featured section, and the footer logo on the left.  After those few spruce ups I was happy enough with the design to use it.

Originally, I created a design which was more obviously an education focused site.  As you can imagine it fed all the cliche education imaging such as chalkboards, desks, pencils, etc.  I started the design, bounced the concept off of my students and later became un-inspired.  I gave up the design only to discover it again last week.  I became inspired again and began working on it.  All of this just to feel un-inspired again.  I think I’ve taken it as a cool piece of art to work on rather than a site design.  I think its a really nice design, just not something that would function nicely as a site.  Take a look at the design, but note that it is not a complete design.

Photorealism is something I have always been into as you can read on another article I wrote about it, but you can see how I’ve incorporated it into this design.

Why a new design?

I am very happy with the current design, as I’ve said, but it doesn’t scream teaching site.  It can be deduced but not as quickly as I’d like.  However, this site does solve the problems I was attempting to alleviate for my students in a new design (ie: more quickly finding their warm ups, a more hide-able blog, etc).  I just want something that defines this site as a teachers website.

The Problems

How do I place the content but still allow my beautiful imaging to be seen?

I’ve thought of placing white transparent boxes over the images, but then that runs into not being able to properly see the content as it can meld in with the background.

How do I make the content expandable but keep the background?

I could make the background image fixed but then I’ll run into problems with the text flowing over parts that it should not be flowing over, like the chalkboard, etc.

These are only two problems, but major ones.  If you have some comments or suggestions as to me attaining these goals with this design or if you think the design is trash, let me know.