I’m going to a workshop on project management today; one of the perks of being faculty/staff at KU. I’ve felt a lot of internal pressure to become better at this craft and, while I don’t expect this workshop to cure any inadequacies I have in this department, I hope to get a few tips on how to move forward.
One big hump I’ve struggled to get over is software for managing this stuff. Microsoft Project is only an option if I boot it up in Parallels, but I’d rather not have to deal with its complexities. Basecamp and ActiveCollab are a little closer to what I’m after, not only in the simplicity area but also in the collaboration department, but I have a feeling getting work to pay for the former would be a pain, and it looks like the latter is sadly taking a commercial route as well. That’s too bad–its peers on Freshmeat tend to not be the user-friendliest solutions.
I suppose I could try writing one for myself–I actually did so, unknowingly, about ten years ago. In retrospect it worked pretty well–it kept track of projects, team members, and notes. Nothing fancy–some Perl CGIs, but the organization I wrote it for used it in some permutation for quite some time. Seeing as how many Web 2.0 project management startups there already are, and how many of them are written in Rails, such a task shouldn’t be that hard, right?
In the meantime, Dreamhost offers a one-click install for ActiveCollab, at least while it’s still open source, and I’ve set it up try to establish a little order in my life.
A year or two ago, rather famously around these parts, KU paid an out-of-town design firm close to $90,000 to design a new “signature.” (The fact that this overpriced work is quite reminiscent of another school’s logo is still cause for conversation.)
This was just one part of KU’s visual identity push. New letterhead. New business cards. And for gosh sakes, your departmental website better look like everything else on campus! To accomplish that last bit, the KU Web Strategy Team (yes, that’s a real working group) developed a convoluted, server side includes-based template system and strongly suggested a speedy adoption of said templates by all departments.
I refuse to apply these templates to my work at Stratepedia–those are web applications, not sites, and a row of buttons pointing to KU-specific stuff will just confuse the 98% of my audience that’s not affiliated with the university. But I bit and switched over one of my sites to the template, mostly so it would match with the rest of the CRL’s site.
Anyway, here is what I came up with for the Content Literacy Continuum website. It wasn’t too bad to migrate over because it doesn’t have a whole lot of content, but I was able to take the KU templates, move them to my server, and get everything working within a couple of hours. The big point I like to make with these shots is that the stock photos are of kids who’ve accomplished something from all that help CLC gives them–they’re not toiling away in the classroom or huddled around a computer screen like so many other stock photo kids on education-oriented websites are. Maybe I’m the only one who appreciates that.
I’m just going to share the one shot because it’s not like I did a lot of design work here–please don’t blame me for the boring font selection.