If you’re reading this post on a mobile device, via an RSS feed or through an email subscription, you probably haven’t noticed that we just launched our newly redesigned website. It’s been a few years since our last website redesign. This time around, we decided to focus less on making our website the main destination, and more on making our content accessible in various ways to others.
Our new front page displays the rotating set of ‘features’ (a very popular thing to do on most modern websites). If there’s something we really want you to know about, you’ll see it included as one of these slides. Right below the featured content, you’ll find our links to recent blog posts and upcoming events.
Toward the bottom of every page, our redesigned footer includes links to all of our social media resources, our contact info, and our most recent post from Twitter.
Nearly every CIT project, including fellowships, grants, and even some consulting work, gets added to our website at some point. Our revamped ‘Examples‘ section provides ways to access our resources by both official CIT programs, or just by broad discipline.
Our blog now contains both our most recent news items and our most recent examples involving instructional technology at Duke (and elsewhere). We’ve tightened up our sidebar to include a shorter list of recent posts and popular topics. We’ve also included an easier way to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which includes the best of the our recent blog posts, news on upcoming events and other CIT announcements.
As for the blog posts themselves, we’ve added several ways to share the post’s content with others. On the top of each post, you’ll find a small set of icons that allow you to share the post via Twitter, Facebook or email, plus print the post if necessary.
At the bottom of each post, we’ve included a short bio of each post author with links to more of their posts. This can be useful when looking for projects related to say, one of our consultants, as most of our consultants write about their own projects. We’ve also included the (seemingly ubiquitous) Facebook ‘like’ button at the bottom of each post, enabling you to add a link to our post to your own Facebook account.
We built this version of the website using the popular blogging and web-publishing tool WordPress (which, many at Duke now know about through the Sites@Duke WordPress service). WordPress provides us with the ability to generate and add RSS feeds for most of our content, which in turn allows us to add some ‘contextual’ links on some pages. For example, the page below provides information on Course Materials for teaching. The sidebar automatically updates with our most recent blog posts related to course materials for teaching.
Our thanks to our friends at Duke Libraries and Duke OIT for help and advice along the way. We’d love to hear from our readers as well – please contact CIT if you have any feedback on the redesign.