Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
One of my websites has won an award. The University of Guelph website has been awarded the Gold medal from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE) in their annual Prix D’Excellence awards program. The CCAE competition recognizes outstanding achievements in alumni affairs, public affairs, development, student recruitment and overall institutional Advancement. Our last CCAE award for the website was back in 2001 when we won a Gold medal with the introduction of the previous design.
The site was assessed by advancement colleagues and external professional judges on the overall effectiveness of the homepage with regard to institutional identity; availability of appropriate and desirable links; ease of use; consideration of the institution’s audiences; and quality of multi-media presentations linked to the homepage. The Judges noted the overall strengths of the site included modern design, Web 2.0 principles, and a focus on useful, well-presented content. “The navigation is clear, the code is strong, and the writing is crisp and concise.”
(more…)
Tags: awards, business, design, development, university
Posted in designmeme | 2 Comments »
Friday, March 16th, 2007
You can now order web design gear from the Design Meme store. Current items include a head tag hat, a body tag shirt, a strong cup of coffee, and a bib to help your fussy eater subscribe to feed.
All products are 100% guaranteed to make you a better web designer… or at least look like one. 
Tags: blog, business, designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
I thought it an interesting coincidence that yesterday, Bob Rae mentioned Wikipedia during his keynote speech. Earlier that morning I had mentioned Wikipedia and politicians during my own presentation, so I decided to ask Bob about updating his own entry.
In an even more interesting coincidence, today’s keynote covered virtually the same topics I had been talking about yesterday – although admittedly with a bit more detail and eloquence.
(more…)
Tags: blog, business, designmeme, development, web
Posted in designmeme | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have confirmed something I’ve had a growing suspicion of—meetings are bad. The longer and more frequent meetings, the greater the negative effects on the participants: anxiety, burnout, and depression.
Over at 37 Signals, they offer some suggestions as to why frequent and long meetings are bad — they usually contain a very low amount of information conveyed per minute, they drift off subject far too easily, and they’re normally all about words and abstract concepts, not real things. Their advice for dealing with meetings: don’t have them. Or if you absolutely have to have a meeting, keep it short. 30 minutes at the most.
Once the meetings are short, and less frequent, the next step is making them more productive. Manager Tools has some great tips and resources to help with this, including sample agenda templates to download and a very good podcast.
I’ve also heard very good things about John Cleese’s training video Meetings, Bloody Meetings, in which he is a thoroughly inefficient chairperson who dreams he is hauled up before a court for negligent conduct of meetings. Unfortunately the DVD is $650… so I think I’ll try and borrow it from someone who already owns a copy.
Tags: business, designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 5 Comments »
